6 ms·

so this is again one of these "material x was slightly better in a lab experiment" -> "we conclude that it certainly can be used as part of a complex technology

• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sillysaurusx 4y ago
  (RIP memristors. Those have similarly been on the cusp of revolutionizing everything for … I think over a decade now?)
  • ewams 4y ago
    Yup, I wrote about them from an HP conference in 2010 and remember being told about them for a roadmap item well before that: http://ewams.net/?date=2010/09/05&view=hptechforum2010 http://ewams.net/?date=2010/09/05&view=hptechforum2010 Another one of those "right around the corner" things that is always coming soon.
    • hinkley 4y ago
      World is full of technologies that would be cool if you also had a Time Machine. But other tech outpaces is so if it is born behind it never takes off. Some of it is pretty fun for playing what if with (enforced) pastoralism. Using primitive materials with a modern understanding of them, instead of limiting yourself to historically accurate processes.
    • agumonkey 4y ago
      I take the slightly more patient approach with this. LCD used very old discoveries, something need to mature through a few industrial cycles before it gets discarded I guess.
  • monocasa 4y ago
    The rumor I heard was that HP licensed all the rights to the tech away and development has stalled since no entity can put their hands on enough of the IP to do anything with. : / So development has pretty much stalled since the last time HP showed of The Machine with memristors.
    • bilsbie 4y ago
      The patents should be nearly expired by now.
      • monocasa 4y ago
        A quick patent search shows that we still have a nontrivial amount of time on them.
      • pencilguin 4y ago
        Patents on fractal compression and related techniques are all expired now. There might still be people who remember how to use them. Do we see any use of it, now?
        • mlindner 4y ago
          IMO compression was a lot more important when we had modems and disk sizes measured in megabytes or single digit gigabytes. Once you have "good enough" compression then you solve most issues and in many areas where there used to be compression they've been increasingly removing it. Compression causes latency after all and some of the biggest impediments to processing speed now is latency. So unlike before, compression has stopped being a primary driving factor in the engineering of many types of devices and types of software.
          • pencilguin 4y ago
            Raw data compression was once an attractive application, but the method is more general. That said, streaming services still pay a great deal for bandwidth and storage in edge nodes. Cell- and keyframe-oriented video compression are reaching their limit. We are still interested in feature extraction and scene composition, which both benefit from more compact representation. To compete with hardware-assisted decoding in display hardware, fractal rendering would probably need to be coded to run in Vulkan.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    The renewed interest in them and the PR hoopla is closer to 14 years...
  • chc4 4y ago
    3D XPoint, used in Optane memory, used memristors.
    • ofrzeta 4y ago
      It's funny that it's debatable what's a memristor and what's not: "Intel has stated that 3D XPoint does not use a phase-change or memristor technology, although this is disputed by independent reviewers." (Wikipedia)
  • ip26 4y ago
    In that case it seems the real problem is that the killer app hasn’t been found yet.
• jackmott 4y ago
• 323 4y ago
  I remember 15 years ago reading about EUV litography and a lot of people were saying that it looks like a pipe dream because they don't know of any way to produce a EUV light source strong enough, outside nuclear explosions and the like.
  • exyi 4y ago
    So it took about 10 years to get into production. OP isn't claiming it's impossible, just that it's far from being practical. You could definitely say that about EUV 15y ago
  • kken 4y ago
    It took 25 years to commercialize EUV. And that is from the point where a decision was made to industrialize it, not from the first scientific report about EUV radiation. edit, see Zeiss page on EUV: https://www.zeiss.com/semiconductor-manufacturing-technology/smt-magazine/euv-lithography-as-an-european-joint-project.html https://www.zeiss.com/semiconductor-manufacturing-technology...
    • rocket_surgeron 4y ago
      Some of people and organizations think in terms of decades and know that "soon" doesn't mean "tomorrow". The world will not be free of short-term thinking until the last MBA is strangled with the entrails of the last PMP.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    Yes, but do you remember all the BS PR releases about new "promising" techniques and materials that would "revolutionize" this or that process, that we read 15 and 20 and 30 years ago, that never materialized at all?
    • sylware 4y ago
      nanoimprint (heard it is making a comeback in Japan), x-ray litography, mass electron beam litography...
  • 4y ago
• hinkley 4y ago
  Reading the article I wondered if tapered interconnects were the solution. Fat interconnects with thin fins? Probably harder to calculate inductance and capacitance, but these people deal with complexity all day. Not entirely sure how you’d avoid voids with tapers facing upward, but you can orient them in five out of six directions. And I’ve seen a few examples of the weird games they have to play with light to get the crisp corners they are after so maybe tapers would be easier?
  • kken 4y ago
    The actual discovery is reported in one of the last paragraphs: >The breakthrough relates to a new set of materials that can create monolayer—or two-dimensional (2D)—transistors in a chip to scale the overall density by a factor matching the number of layers. The teams at TSMC and MIT have demonstrated low resistance ohmic contacts with a variety of existing semiconductor materials, including molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), tungsten disulfide (WS2), and tungsten diselenide (WSe2). So it is a better way to make a contact to a semiconductor material that noone knows how to manufacture reliably on a large area wafer.