Posts Tagged ‘chips’
Intel to Mass-Produce New 3-D Transistors for Faster, More Efficient Computer Chips
It’s a major change from the two-dimensional flat transistor structure we all know and love, which has powered every computer chip for the last 50 years. The 3-D switch design and the scale of its production will allow Moore’s Law to advance apace, Intel said.
Moore’s Law holds that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit will double every two years, but this places limits on the circuits’ size — a growing problem as engineers cram greater numbers of transistors onto ever-tinier chips. A 3-D switch could allow computer chips to be built like skyscrapers, optimizing space by building upward, and thereby allowing uninhibited transistor growth.
The Tri-Gate transistors consist of a thin 3-D silicon fin that arises vertically from the silicon substrate, Intel explains. Each fin has three gates, one on the top and one on each side, which allows for greater transistor current control. When it’s on, current flow is more efficient, and when the switches are off, the flow of electrons is closer to zero. By contrast, flat transistors have one gate, only on top.
All this leads to greater efficiency, allowing chips to operate at a lower voltage and with lower leakage — Intel claims a whopping 37 percent performance increase over its 2-D chips. Since the fins and their gates are vertical, more transistors can be packed close together. Eventually, designers will be able to make taller fins, aiming for even better performance.
“It will give product designers the flexibility to make current devices smarter and wholly new ones possible,” said Mark Bohr, a senior fellow at Intel.
More than 6 million 22-nm Tri-Gate transistors could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence, according to the company. (If you zoom in, who knows how many could fit!)
The new transistors will be integrated into Ivy Bridge-based Intel Core processors by the end of this year, which consumers will be able to get in 2012, Intel said.
Plenty of other chip designers have been talking about 3-D chips — just last month, we saw a 2-D reprogrammable one designed to behave . But Intel has taken it a step further by figuring out how to mass-produce them.
It’s technically 3-D because the switches are vertical and horizontal, but the transistors are not stacked, allowing electrons to flow in three dimensions — that’s a holy Grail of microprocessor design. But a new circuit design that allows more transistors on tinier spaces certainly sounds like a major breakthrough.
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New Nanostructured Snack Packaging Is Most Airtight Ever
The nanobrick film was unveiled over the weekend at the National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif. According to Jaime Grunlan, who developed the material, it is "truly the most oxygen-impermeable film in existence," as impervious to air as glass is.
Snack makers have experimented with a wide range of , all meant to keep food fresh even as it languishes on store shelves. Most of the packaging processes are meant to keep out oxygen; current examples include soda bottles coated with silicon oxide and chip bags lined with foil. But metal — also used in the military’s meals ready to eat — can’t be microwaved, and consumers can’t see inside to glimpse the tasty treats.
The new material would be layered onto an existing plastic package, improving its strength and blocking oxygen, according to a news release from the ACS. It’s made from montmorillonite clay, a soil component that is also used to make bricks, but it looks transparent.
Beyond keeping Twinkies fresh for millennia, the nanobricks could also be used to make flexible electronics, tires and even sporting goods, according to ACS. “It could potentially help basketballs and footballs stay inflated longer than existing balls,” ACS says.
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Native Chinese Supercomputer Could Be World’s Most Efficient
The race for performance-per-watt is on
Officials at China’s Institute of Computing Technology recently announced a summer launch for the country’s first wholly indigenous supercomputer, the , which will achieve 300 teraflops using 3,000 1 GHz 8-core Godson (also known as Loongson) 3B chips. It’s very efficient at 3.2 gigaflops per watt — or 128 gigaflops using the power of a typical light bulb.
This is possible because of the Godson chip’s relatively low clock speed, at 1.0 GHz, and its use of the old-school 64-bit MIPS architecture, according to .
As computers grow ever more powerful, they also grow more power-hungry, requiring rooms full of cooling systems. So power-sipping supercomputers would be a major advancement. predicts performance per watt will become the dominant supercomputer awesomeness metric.
IBM’s new , slated to be delivered next year, will be one of the most energy-efficient in the world, thanks to improved chip designs and an efficient water-cooling system. Mira will be built on a Blue Gene/Q platform, currently tops in terms of performance per watt.
But HPC Wire says the Godson platform could give Blue Gene/Q a run for its money. The MIPS architecture is known for high function at low power, which is why MIPS cores can be found in technology ranging from portable video game consoles to wireless routers.
The People’s Republic is performing pretty well in the supercomputing race. Its supercomputer is the world’s fastest, achieving 2.507 petaflops via 7,168 NVIDIA GPUs and 14,336 CPU. But those components are made by American companies.
Ultimately, the Godson chips are unlikely to challenge companies like AMD and Intel in western computers. But HPC Wire notes they could cut into those companies’ imports into China.
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Harvard’s Four-Cent Paper Accelerometer Could Make Motion Sensing Ubiquitous
Harvard professor George Whitesides developed the paper accelerometers using chromatography paper, tiny sliver and carbon contact pads, and vinyl stencils. The process is so cheap and easy that the sensors could be disposable.
Accelerometers are found in everything from car airbag systems to bridges to , where they basically measure the g-forces an object is experiencing. This information is relayed to other systems. In a car, for instance, acceleration forces might trigger airbags to deploy. The NFL is researching the use of to study head impacts.
Most MEMS accelerometers are silicon-based, and fabricating them takes several days of work inside clean rooms. But building the paper ones just requires some scissors, glue and thick paper, according to IEEE. The paper sensor, which is a bit larger than a dime, consists of a cantilever cut out of chromatography paper, which is used for chemistry experiments. It bends under force and stresses a carbon piece, which changes the piece's resistance. for a description of how this works.
The best thing about the paper sensors is the other types of substrates they might enable, according to Kevin Dowling, vice president for research and development at mc10, a flexible-electronics start-up in Cambridge, Mass. “If you can make such sensors on paper, you can make them on stretchable, biocompatible substrates like silicone, and then you can mimic the properties of skin,” he told IEEE.
The paper accelerometer is not as sensitive as its silicon counterparts, however; they can measure teeny forces smaller than 80 micronewtons, and the paper only reaches about 120 micronewtons. Still, it’s an impressive feat for something made out of paper — really, who even uses that stuff anymore?
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Chip-Sized Particle Accelerators Could Lead to Cancer-Fighting Ray Guns
OK, so it can’t reach the energies produced at the LHC or Tevatron, but this is still pretty impressive. Engineers at a micro-electro mechanical systems conference last week unveiled this tiny cyclotron device, which can speed argon ions down a 5-millimeter accelerator track.
The ions have 1.5 kiloelectron volts of energy and pick up another 30 electronvolts when they whiz around a 90-degree turn, as IEEE Spectrum explains. That is peanuts compared to the 3.5 teraelectron volts currently experienced at the LHC, but hey, this chip is several orders of magnitude smaller than that massive series of tubes.
Unlike most other accelerators, this device skips magnets and instead uses an electrical field to accelerate and steer its particles through a pair of electrodes.
The goal is a suitcase-sized accelerator capable of producing 1 MeV, which would make it powerful enough for a wide range of uses, according to the chip’s creators at Cornell University. Such a device could be used to make smaller scanning electron microscopes or portable ray guns to fight cancer, rather than installing particle accelerators inside hospitals, for instance: “Think of a scalpel with a proton beam coming out of it,” said Amit Lal, who worked with chip-builder Yue Shi and leads Cornell’s SonicMEMS Laboratory.
A few hurdles remain, including a more efficient way to grab ions from the 75-micrometer-wide beam. Lots of ions are lost in the transition, Shi said. But the device at least proves the concept that you don’t need humongous frozen magnets and cavernous spaces to speed up some particles.
DARPA is funding the work, which is ongoing at Cornell.
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Feds charge five tech consultants with illegal insider trading
Federal prosecutors charged five Silicon Valley workers with illegal insider trading today, alleging that they used information they obtained about technology companies such as Dell, Apple, Advanced Micro Devices and Flextronics to profit on their shares.
The charges stemmed from a three-year investigation; in the past few weeks, federal investigators have raided several hedge-fund and mutual-fund operators in connection with the probe. Those charged worked either as consultants or employees for Primary Global Research, a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that bills itself an “expert network,” an operation which connects investors with knowledgeable professionals paid a fee for their advice. The five charged stand accused of passing information about their employers or other tech companies to fund managers.
The probe was first reported by the last month.
What’s stunning about these allegations is that smart people would do this. There are plenty of legal ways to make money in Silicon Valley. But it also shows that the temptations are great for suppliers with inside information to signal to investors when they have concrete information on the next hot gadget — especially when big companies like Apple and Google are tight-lipped about such news.
Some of the leads for the case came from the investigation of the.
“The information trafficked by the four ‘consultants’ went way beyond permissible market research,” FBI official Janice Fedarcyk said Thursday to the Journal. “It was insider information.”
Primary Global is a go-between that hooks investors up with “actionable intelligence” about the companies. Those arrested were James Fleishman, a vice president and sales manager at Primary Global; and consultants Walter Shimoon, a senior director of business development at Flextronics in San Diego; Mark Anthony Longoria, a supply-chain manager with AMD; and Manosha Karunatilaka, an account manager at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Daniel DeVore, another consultant, was a former global supply manager at Dell; he pleaded guilty to charges on Dec. 10 and is cooperating.
In other words, the insider information was gleaned from the suppliers for big companies and it was used to generate profits via stock trading. The charges included wire fraud and conspiracy. The consultants allegedly received more than $400,000 for their information. The consultants spent a lot of time on the phone with investors; over 60 days in 2009, he participated in 40 phone calls with investors. Attorneys for some of the consultants weren’t available, the Journal said.
Shimoon of Flextronics reportedly disclosed highly confidential details about sales forecasts and product features for an upcoming iPhone. From August 2007 to November 2010, he was paid more than $22,000. Flextronics said he had been terminated. Longoria resigned from AMD in October. He reportedly disclosed AMD revenue information, average chip prices, product sales figures and gross margin information. He was paid $200,000, prosecutors said. AMD said it is cooperating with the U.S. Attorney’s office. An attorney for Longoria said he was cooperating as well.
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Intel chips headed to 35 tablets and ‘premier’ smartphones in 2011
Intel is not to be counted out of the smartphone battle yet, as its chips are headed to 35 tablets (including some already available) and “premier” smartphone vendors in 2011, based on comments from the company’s CEO Paul Otelinni.
The news follows on the heels of our report yesterday regarding — the creation of which we found suspiciously quiet. Otellini says the tablets, including those from Dell, Asus, Lenovo and Toshiba, will roll out of the first half of 2011. Smartphones running Intel’s Medfield chip will land in the second half of next year.
Intel’s pursuit of smartphones is “a marathon, not a sprint”, Otelinni said. The company isn’t slowing down after the release of the first Medfield chip. Otellini added that Intel’s second-generation Medfield chip for smartphones is already being tested by customers and is expected to ship towards the end of 2011 and early 2012.
I suppose a marathon is a good analogy for Intel’s strategy — except Intel’s competitors already have several years ahead of the company in this particular race. What good is positioning its strategy as a marathon, when it’s clear the company was just running in place as its competitors passed it by?
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