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Maybe it's a viable research project, but still far off from reality. The largest chips that can be manufactured with current technology are about 900 mm^2 in s
by exDM69 9y ago
Maybe it's a viable research project, but still far off from reality. The largest chips that can be manufactured with current technology are about 900 mm^2 in size, but a normal 10" wafer is about 51000 mm^2, which is 50x larger than the state of the art today.
An attempt to produce entire wafers in one go is also a big gamble. Any defects in the manufacturing could ruin the entire wafer rather than individual chips. Parts of the wafer could be disabled if defective, but it would result in a combinatorial explosion of different configurations.
Also worth noting that in 1980 when Wafer Scale Integration was researched (without success), wafers were 4" diameter. Current wafers are 10-12" in size, which makes the process much more difficult and error prone.
- jecel 9y agoThe two big waferscale efforts of the 1980s were by Gene Amdahl and Clive Sinclair. Amdahl did run into technical problems connecting multiple wafers to build mainframes and using lasers to swap out bad subparts (both currently solved problems and normal industry practice). But in Sinclair's case investors pulled out despite technical success because hard disk prices started falling exponentially after having stayed stable for many years. The irony was that he had done the "silicon disk" waferscale RAM just to not scare of investors with his real goal of a manycore processor on a wafer.