Moore's Law Staying Strong Through 30nm 199
jeffsenter writes "The NYTimes has the story on IBM with JSR Micro advancing photolithograhy research to allow 30nm chips. Good news for Intel, AMD, Moore's Law and overclockers. The IBM researchers' technology advance allows for the same deep ultraviolet rays used to make chips today to be used at 30nm. Intel's newest CPUs are manufactured at 65nm and present technology tapped out soon after that. This buys Moore's Law a few more years."
I've heard that one before... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've heard that more than a few times.Isn't that why it's a law? It seems like every 18 months or so, Moore ends up almost petering out (kind of like apple...) and there ends up being a redeeming breakthrough that keeps it around.
If it wasn't a law, we'd just call it Moore's hypothesis, or Moore's pittiful attempt at justifying an upgrade. I remember the day when 50Mhz was the theoretical limit for speed and then they got the grand idea of putting a heat sink on the chip.
--pete
Enough to run the DRM... (Score:4, Insightful)
So your computer will be nice and fast, just not any of your applications...
Z.
Moore is Less (Score:3, Insightful)
This isn't good news at all (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't good news at all.
Re:Well, NO. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, NO. (Score:5, Insightful)
* Same thing with the active components. If you try making the transistor half the old linear dimensions, you have 1/8th the volume of active silicon. This leads to all kinds of problems with leakage and power handling capability.
* A line that's half as wide and half as thick has four times the resistance per unit length, and 1/4 the current-carrying capacity. You can try using a better conductor, but once you get to using copper, you're done.
Why do I get the feeling that you actually have no idea what you are talking about, and neither do the people who modded you up. Etching, depositing, and lithography all go hand in hand when talking about an Xnm "process", therefore your comment about "thinner lines", in fact, makes no tangible sense. Lithography is the most difficult to shrink, not etching, so I'm really failing to see your point. It has been the main technical hurdle for the past 10 years.
Furthermore, the "conductors" in a processor aren't nearly as dependant on size as the silicon-feature construction. You can have an extremely layered chip with larger conductors if need be (and modern chips are), so both comment #1 and #3 are reasonably meaningless.
As for comment #2, yes, you are right: the "smaller transistor" problem is very well understood and it's the reason it takes so long to construct smaller and smaller processes, because the physics and effects must be taken into account. Not all transistors on a chip are the same size, nor can all transistors be shrunk. There is a reason that Intel doesn't slap it's PentiumIV plans into the new 30nm machine, and out comes a new chip. They have to go through and make sure that all the transistors that can be shrunk are, and none of those that cannot, are not. This is a reasonably non-trivial task, but it is not impossible, nor a "large can of whup-ass".
(PS: Thanks for the math lesson about 2d vs 3d in part 1. You might want to recheck part 3, with that in mind.)
Re:I've heard that one before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Gearing up for a processor run can't just be done overnight. A fabrication line has to be created, and chip designs crafted to build certain chips at a certain process. This takes time (ask AMD). Whilst this is being done, the next process would be being researched, and ways would be discovered to make the new process profitable and not ridiculously expensive. Then, to build chips at the new process, new chip designs and fab lines have to be done. This
takes time. Whilst this is being done, the next process would be being researched, etc etc. If Intel perpetually waited for "the smallest possible process" we'd never get any chips.
There probably is an element of truth to your argument, I'm sure Intel does try to milk the most out of it's existing run to benefit from economies of scale. But scaling to the next process is not a simple task.
Re:Enough to run the DRM... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, why that might be true for some, I've not yet seen any DRM software coming from the OSS camp. You all run DRM enabled AIM 6.6.6, I'll sit over here nice an happy running my gAIM 7.0 on my 23 teraherts AMD Zues 5400k+ with my 1.2 jigawatt powersuply. It'll run nice and fast.
Oh, and that's not to mention linux not having DRM. And before you tell me that I won't be able to play my DVD's, or mp3's, or whatever, I'll point out OggVorbis for audio files (no DRM in that, nor will there be) and I'll also point out the simple fact that 8 out of 10 hackers run linux. How could they live without their StarWars DVD's, or Doom3: The Rock's Back, Again.
Silly Consumer, DRM's for Little Girly Men.
--Macguyvok
Great, now let's get software on board (Score:3, Insightful)
We call it Moore's law... (Score:3, Insightful)
And the rub of it is exactly what you say - it seems to just keep going and going, despite its obvious unsustainability. My dad used an osciloscope on single bits in radio tubes, can you imagine what they said in the 60s? 70s? 80s? 90s? "This can't go on". Moore's law seemed (seems?) to stand above the laws of nature. That's what makes it so intriguing. But it has far more to do with social science than natural science...
Re:Glad to see IBM catching up... (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM's annoucement has a lot to do with stretching the usefulness of existing litho equipment and materials down to nodes that it was never expected to reach. This has been done again (65nm) and again (45nm) from what was once expected. IBM is saying, add water, and we'll do it again (30nm).
Re:I've heard that one before... (Score:3, Insightful)
Secondly, Moore's law is about transistors per chip, so maybe you mean Equivalent Transistor Count.
Re:Punctuated Equilibrium - Phase Transition in Mo (Score:3, Insightful)
Explain the human mind, then.
Re:Well, NO. (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides do not forget that you need a lot of current to charge a very small capacitor very fast! Modern minimal sized transistors can switching a 10 to 100mA each. These currents have to go through a almost 100nm with (copper)line. That are still high current densities!
Going back on topic, the real amazing thing is that they can make very small lines (30nm) with light of a much larger wave length! Currently the industry can make 65nm lines using light with 193nm wavelenght! Think about it, this is line with a size of 1/3 of the wave length used! IBM has probably used 157nm wavelength to make 30nm lines, which means an factor of 5!
Using much smaller wavelengths is a problem there the light (if you can still call it that) will be absorbed instead of transmitted by conventional lenses. See for example http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sween.html [llnl.gov] for more info.
Thus special (expensive) lenses are needed when using Extreme-UV. The real news in this article is that it they made it possible with 'conventional' lenses and light sources!
Good news for silicon (Score:2, Insightful)
IBM Microelectronics doesn't have a monopoly over photolithography. They couldn't get a patent if they tried--there's prior art going back about half a century. In other words, it's good news for IBM, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Micron, Freescale, Agere, Samsung, Fujitsu, and anyone else building chips.
But feel free to wave the POWER flag if you like. It's a nice architecture.
Re:Punctuated Equilibrium - Phase Transition in Mo (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple. The amazing things that the human brain is capable of doing are parallelizable. Things like recognizing the shape of letters or phonemes in speech are definitely parallelizable tasks.
Try doing something that isn't parallelizable, like modular exponentiation of a 2048-bit number, in the human brain. It goes very slowly.
Melissa
Moore's law is more vague than people give credit. (Score:3, Insightful)
Moore's law will probably continue after quantum well transistors are implemented and minituarized. The Cell architecture and push for multi-core processors lend themselves well to Moore's law as well. I would wager designing 4-8 core CPUs, multi-core CPUs with shared caches and the new AMD chips that integrate the memory controller rather than using a Northbridge easily satisfy Moore's law.