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Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The
by sanxiyn 3y ago
Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing.
> In addition, various energy sources used for deposition are not limited to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) using heat, but atomic layer deposition (ALD), sputtering, and thermal evaporation, e-beam evaporation, molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), pulsed laser deposition (PLD), etc. are also included without limitation as long as the raw material can be deposited.
Listed methods are those used in semiconductor manufacturing to introduce materials to the wafers. It is also significant that the company's marketing material describes its resistance as "1/10^4 less than copper", because copper is currently used as a conductor in chips. (It wasn't always so, it used to be aluminium, which is a fascinating story itself. Read more on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_interconnects.)
https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537/en https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2023027537/en
- askvictor 3y agoIs the copper or the silicon responsible for most of the heat in a chip?
- sanxiyn 3y agoIt is the copper.
- russdill 3y agoSuperconductors don't make dynamic power somehow go to zero, switching from one state to another still means draining the capacitance.
- sanxiyn 3y agoSure, I said cooler chips, not chips with no heat.
- throwawaylinux 3y ago> Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing. Power consumption due to R in metal stack is not a large proportion of total. There could be bigger opportunity in reducing wire delay though.
- maho 3y agoNote that the resistance of superconductors is 0 only for DC currents. The AC resistance is not 0 and typically gets larger for higher frequencies!
- sanxiyn 3y agoYes, but computer chips are powered by DC.
- martyvis 3y agoPower dissipation in chips isn't an issue with the DC power supply but switching the current billions of times a second.
- regularfry 3y agoI thought that was the switching loss of the transistors themselves, not the interconnects?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thehappypm 3y agoNo? Transistors have a voltage drop in operational mode, and P=IV.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- crote 3y agoAt the frequencies computer chips operate, it acts more like AC. Sure, you place some nice bypass capacitors capacitors very close to the chip so you can feed it nice clean DC power, but when you start switching those transistors in the GHz range, the signals inside the chip rapidly start to look a lot like AC. You see the same thing with external signals, like a connection between CPU and memory. Operate the bus at 1MHz and it is effectively DC. The signal has a wavelength of 300 meters, so when the signal travels a distance literally two orders of magnitude smaller across your motherboard the AC behavior is negligible. Operate that same bus at 1GHz and your wavelength is down to 30cm. Got a 40cm-wide motherboard? Better treat it like a transmission line or it isn't going to work!