4 ms·

Curious as to how will they solve current leakage on something this small? Interesting nonetheless.

by binarymax 16y ago

nazgulnarsil 16y ago
this and heat are the main issues, not shrinking the transistors AFAIK.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The masks uses to produce this stuff are works of art, they take in to account the distortion and interference of the waves used for the exposure.
  - snissn 16y ago
    But not at the single atom level, tunneling becomes a much much bigger problem -- it's definitely exponential. the bbc article doesn't say, but my guess is that it has to be super cooled to work. Which makes a lot of sense actually considering that this group says that on the bigger picture they're working on Quantum Computing, which generally is only done in the laboratory at temperatures pushing our ability to cool things down near abs zero. So these guys probably don't care that to actually use this set of atoms as a transistor, you may have to be really cold, or even use a really low clock cycle, because their bigger goal is to create a quantum computer, which would be soo powerful for certain things that having to query it at a very low frequency, and have it be in the lab are OK things
    - hugh3 16y ago
      I've tracked down the paper and you're right -- all measurements are done at a temperature of 20 mK.
  - hugh3 16y ago
    I'm still looking for the actual paper, but I'm pretty sure these are done with a scanning tunnelling microscope, not a mask.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Ah ok, so they're nowhere near a workable process, just a theoretical experiment. That's another 10 to 15 years at a minimum then.
      - hugh3 16y ago
        It's not a "theoretical experiment", but it certainly isn't ready for scaleup to mass production.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  I wonder if, as gradual progress is made on these issues, some of the techniques can be back-scaled to larger die sizes for multi-layered chips. This happens to some extent already - current Intel and AMD chips have 10 layers or more. IBM made a minor splash (groan) a few years ago when they unveiled water-cooled chips that had liquid flowing though 50u channels. They're in partnership with a Swiss university on a technology called Aquasar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbGyAXsLzIc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbGyAXsLzIc), the first incarnation of which is anticipated to go online this year.

Curious as to how will they solve current leakage on something this small? Interesting nonetheless.

nazgulnarsil 16y ago

this and heat are the main issues, not shrinking the transistors AFAIK.

jacquesm 16y ago
The masks uses to produce this stuff are works of art, they take in to account the distortion and interference of the waves used for the exposure.
- snissn 16y ago
  But not at the single atom level, tunneling becomes a much much bigger problem -- it's definitely exponential. the bbc article doesn't say, but my guess is that it has to be super cooled to work. Which makes a lot of sense actually considering that this group says that on the bigger picture they're working on Quantum Computing, which generally is only done in the laboratory at temperatures pushing our ability to cool things down near abs zero. So these guys probably don't care that to actually use this set of atoms as a transistor, you may have to be really cold, or even use a really low clock cycle, because their bigger goal is to create a quantum computer, which would be soo powerful for certain things that having to query it at a very low frequency, and have it be in the lab are OK things
  - hugh3 16y ago
    I've tracked down the paper and you're right -- all measurements are done at a temperature of 20 mK.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I'm still looking for the actual paper, but I'm pretty sure these are done with a scanning tunnelling microscope, not a mask.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Ah ok, so they're nowhere near a workable process, just a theoretical experiment. That's another 10 to 15 years at a minimum then.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      It's not a "theoretical experiment", but it certainly isn't ready for scaleup to mass production.
anigbrowl 16y ago
I wonder if, as gradual progress is made on these issues, some of the techniques can be back-scaled to larger die sizes for multi-layered chips. This happens to some extent already - current Intel and AMD chips have 10 layers or more. IBM made a minor splash (groan) a few years ago when they unveiled water-cooled chips that had liquid flowing though 50u channels. They're in partnership with a Swiss university on a technology called Aquasar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbGyAXsLzIc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbGyAXsLzIc), the first incarnation of which is anticipated to go online this year.