Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (
More info?)
rbmyersusa@gmail.com wrote:
> George Macdonald wrote:
>
>>On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:06:22 -0700, "David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com>
>>wrote:
>>
>>
>>>"Yousuf Khan" <bbbl67@ezrs.com> wrote in message
>>>news:be6se.7244$yU.552272@news20.bellglobal.com...
>>>
>>>
>>>>One of Intel's researchers published a whitepaper concluding that the
>>>>smaller chips get, the more errors they will be susceptible to. That
>>>>however does make the pursuit of Moore's Law questionable. Also makes
>>>>Intel's bragging to the press that it's months ahead of the competition in
>>>>moving to 65-nm not so enviable.
>>>
>>> I learned in college that as chips got smaller, they'd get faster to a
>>>point. Then they would get slower, less reliable, and run hotter. My
>>>professor doubted that chips would ever get below 125nm. He also showed me a
>>>proof that 20,000 bps was over the limit possible over a conventional phone
>>>line.
>>>
>>> It wasn't that he was an idiot. It's that he couldn't anticipate future
>>>discovery. Of course we never know how the next limit will be broken. If we
>>>did, it wouldn't be a limit. But the limit breakers have always come. On
>>>time.
>>
>>And yet the DOD already has its own "flexible fab" to manufacture chips
>>which still work for them:
>>http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA608194.html and
>>"DMEA has recently analyzed a small sample of the latest semiconductors and
>>the robustness tests resulted in 100% failure..." Of course part of the
>>reasons for producing old chips is so they don't have to rewrite their
>>software but the failures are real. After the military, who's next?
>>
>
> Electromigation doesn't seem to be much on the radar--yet. What
> happens when there are only a handful of dopant atoms in a gate? A few
> dopant atoms migrate, and the electrical properties of the gate change
> noticeably. If it's not an important effect, it will only be because
> leakage has killed scaling before it can become important.
>
> RM
>
Electromigration has been on the radar since more years than I want
think about. For a recent example, consider the transition from
Aluminium to Copper. Resistance decrease was nice. EM limit increase
was way nicer.
And did you notice that some brilliant outfit came out with a
statistical timing analysis program for timing chip designs?
del cecchi