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Graphene Interconnects Aim to Give Moore's Law New Life
- devonsolomon 2y agoGraphene seems to be like a hotshot actor who lands a million auditions but somehow never makes it past a walk-on role in a toothpaste commercial.
- XorNot 2y agoIt's because it's just about impossible to handle: the number one thing a sheet of graphene wants to do is stick another sheet of graphene on top of it and become...regular graphite.
- dmead 2y agoWell someone needs to tell graphene so stop fucking it's coworkers and get back to set
- tliltocatl 2y agoThe kids these days are so spoiled. Silicon doping was discovered like when? And how long did it take to make a practical transistor? Seriously through, it's not every new discovered phenomena owes you something.
- devonsolomon 2y agoTrue. Guess I’m disheartened by years of clickbait.
- api 2y agoIt’s okay. Next year we will defeat and reverse aging with one simple trick so you can wait longer, at least according to the latest health science click bait.
- bryanrasmussen 2y agoI will not rest until I have you immortal, flying your fusion powered car, using augmented reality VR controls, to your very own immersive shopping experience with AI assistant android sexbots catering to your every whim and I will not REM enhanced super-sleep until that happens! I'll give you fifteen minutes to call me back. /Jerry Maquire out
- BiteCode_dev 2y ago20 years. And we have been able to produce graphene around 2004 I believe, so we are going soon to cross that threshold.
- dtgriscom 2y agoI've been watching technology for the last fifty+ years, and I had the same (admittedly unfair) reaction as the OP.
- tliltocatl 2y agoLol I'm obviously joking, I'm probably younger than both OP and 70% of people out here. But my point that the nature doesn't owe us anything still stands. University press releases are really to blame for building up unrealistic expectations, but then you can't expect them to honestly tell you "we spend millions on things with zero practical applicability just because it's awesome".
- api 2y agoIt takes a long time to go from lab bench and physics papers to practical use to mass produced and generally available practical use. Graphene has incredible properties as a structural material too but so far producing it at that scale and making it behave properly in things like composites has been very hard. But the physics says once we get it to work we have composites many times stronger than steel or materials like Kevlar.
- brightball 2y agoThe reason is that it’s very difficult to get a consistent product from mining, from what I have heard.
- gaze 2y agoThere’s a few reasons for this. There’s a few ways to make graphene. You can use CVD or you can use mechanical exfoliation. Mechanical exfoliation requires scotch tape and scales to maybe a flake per hour per grad student. CVD is quite scalable but makes shitty graphene. A lot of graphene breakthroughs (superconductivity for instance) needs mechanically exfoliated graphene. Secondly, process fab is VERY conservative. There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them.
- dehrmann 2y agoBut scotch tape is nearly as cheap as grad students.
- tbrownaw 2y ago> There’s numerous amazing ferroelectrics that you can grow tons of that would absolutely spank NAND flash. However, they’re not silicon fab, so nobody makes them. So why doesn't somebody new start making them and put all the current flash producers out of business?
- throwaway48476 2y agoSilicon technology is already so efficient it would be hugely expensive to compete with it. No one has the money or risk appetite to try.
- jiggawatts 2y agoI’d love a reference or two to read on ferroelectric memory tech…
- gaze 2y agoYou might just look for work on HfO2
- Uehreka 2y ago> scotch tape Is there actually a special property of scotch tape that makes it the ideal candidate over some more specialized industrial adhesive? Or are these references to scotch tape generally just references to the fact that you _can_ use scotch tape like the original graphene experiment?
- gigatexal 2y agoAwesome! Let’s hope Intel — for their sake —- can make this happen. But I’m already thinking about light CPUs that use light instead of electricity for computation. Of course I don’t fully know how it works but it seems to be lower power and the next iteration of computation I guess before we get to room temp quantum computers.
- Vecr 2y agoQuantum computers are never* going to be good at a whole lot of tasks that classical computers are already used for. * Some people have weird ideas.
- freehorse 2y agoWell, right now, a magical way to resurrect moore's law is no more or less crazy than a magical way to scale quantum computation.
- ben_w 2y agoThe problem with light is that it's quite a lot bigger than the features on current chips. If you get enough other benefits from going up from 2nm features to e.g. 200nm UV-C photons, then you may still choose to do so.
- graemep 2y agoDo optical gates not switch a lot faster? I do not know whether it would be enough to offset the bigger size.
- ben_w 2y agoThe switches themselves do (IIRC by a factor of about 1e4), but if you have to space them farther apart then the combined whole may not benefit from this. If you have a system clock running at 3 GHz, the speed of light limits your causal distance to just under 10cm per clock cycle. CPUs are already close to that for size and frequency, but let's say you're taking a 1 cm by 1cm silicon chip on a 2nm feature size process and replacing it like-for-like with a photonic chip with light that limits it to 200nm features — now it's 1m by 1m and can't go faster than 300 MHz, likely a lot less. This doesn't mean it is useless — for example, there's a hope that it will reduce energy use, which is directly useful all by itself, but also means it may be sensible to move to a fully 3D structure which silicon can't really manage because of the thermal issues. Going from 2D to 3D helps a lot, might allow that 1m by 1m by 200nm (*2 thickness for insulation) sheet to be compacted to a 7.4mm cube, which then doesn't need to be slowed all the way down to 300 MHz due to causality.
- phkahler 2y agoMoore's law is over. Nothing is going to restore that regular cadence of device shrink and performance increases. Each innovation is now a single tiny step in the endgame of scaling.
- api 2y agoWe are still many clicks from physical limits for computation, so it depends on how much money we want to spend.
- kibwen 2y ago"Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of 2015, the price had reached about 14 billion US dollars." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_second_law It seems likely that we're relatively close to the point where it will no longer be economical to push the limits here. It's unlikely that even the entire world working together would want to spend more than $1T for a single fab, which Rock's law suggests is less than 20 years away.
- aurareturn 2y agoIt seems likely that we're relatively close to the point where it will no longer be economical to push the limits here. It's unlikely that even the entire world working together would want to spend more than $1T for a single fab, which Rock's law suggests is less than 20 years away. Given that Apple at the start of 2019 was worth $600 billion, and now $3.7 trillion 5 short years later, I think a $1 trillion plant in 2045 is not so farfetched. This is especially true if compute requirements for AI continues to grow. Twenty years is a long time. I don't think people in 2025 could have predicted out needs for chips back in 2005.
- fieldcny 2y agoYour are conflating asset price inflation and cost inflation, they are not the same. Apple could lose $2T in market cap next week, the cost of the fab would not be discounted in the same way.
- smartbit 2y ago> The sacrificial film is placed on top of the transistor chip, and a source of carbon is deposited on top. Then, using a pressure of roughly 410 to 550 kilopascals, the carbon is forced through the sacrificial metal, and recombines into clean multilayer graphene underneath. The sacrificial metal is then simply removed, leaving the graphene on-chip for patterning. Incredible
- ryan-duve 2y agoDoes anyone know of a way other than Raman spectroscopy to classify graphene monolayers? I recall making the graphene was simple but confirming it was the real chore.
- alberth 2y agoI put graphene into the same category as quantum computers. No doubt, massive technological advancement if it can me massively produced. But we’ve been waiting 20-years and still haven’t realized the benefits.
- aeonik 2y agoGraphene is closer than quantum. We just need a process breakthrough for manufacturing and integrating it into products. You can even make graphene at home with a blender.
- gpus23 2y agoHard to believe the claims here, when no real empirical data is presented. Has the process been integrated in any foundry (even test fab)? Have they been able to tape out even an old chip, like 180nm, one with copper, one with graphene? If so, at wafer size and what yield? How many metal layers can be processed (global or local interconnects - if it's pressure based, how will the bottom most layers be affected as the interconnect stack is built up? Also, back side power delivery + new materials like Ru will keep interconnect roadmap going for a while. Articles like this read nothing more than fluff pieces.