[opendtv] News: H.P. to Report an Advance in Adaptable Circuitry
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: OpenDTV Mail List <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2007 08:35:47 -0500
Now if we only had extensible standards for DTV...
Craig
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/technology/16nano.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
January 16, 2007
H.P. to Report an Advance in Adaptable Circuitry
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15 - Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed
a novel way to create flexible electronic circuits that could make it
routine by the end of the decade to modify and upgrade the circuitry
in computer-based consumer products even after they have been sold.
The technology grows out of an advance in nanocomputing, which
involves creating circuitry on a molecular scale and making it
interact with today's silicon wires and transistors.
A cellphone using the technology could be wirelessly upgraded to take
advantage of improved wireless network standards. Another potential
use would be in making ultracheap memory chips, and one early
application could be in the ink-jet cartridges which Hewlett-Packard
manufactures by the tens of millions.
The results of the research, which the company plans to report on
Tuesday and will be the subject of an article in the Jan. 24 issue of
the British journal Nanotechnology, are the clearest evidence yet
that the once highly speculative technology could be commercialized
soon.
The H.P. researchers are among dozens of groups in the United States
and elsewhere who have been pursuing molecular computing for more
than a decade. Even as today's microelectronics industry continues to
shrink the size of the wires and switches that make up silicon chips,
most engineers believe that sometime in the next decade the
microelectronics industry will run up against fundamental limits.
That would bring an end to the industrial era that has been defined
by an observation known as Moore's Law, in which chip performance has
increased and cost has decreased at an accelerating rate for four
decades.
That challenge has led a hunt for a new technology in which wires
will be no more than several molecules wide and switches will be
composed of single atoms. So far many laboratories have fabricated
experimental switches and wires on this scale, but little progress
has been made on the crucial technical challenge of how to move
signals between the world of molecular computing and today's
microelectronic systems.
Now the researchers report that they have capitalized on a simple
idea proposed by researchers at Stony Brook University in New York.
Last year two Stony Brook scientists, Dmitri B. Strukov and
Konstantin K. Likharev, proposed a novel way to overlay a mesh of
molecular-scale wires, or nanowires, on top of a conventional chip
circuit to move data between the two worlds.
"What we're doing is extending Moore's Law by 10 to 15 years," said
Mr. Likharev, a physicist at Stony Brook who is a pioneer in
nanotechnology. In 1985, with Dmitri Averin, while teaching the
Moscow State University, he proposed a transistor based on the spin
of a single electron. Two years later researchers at Bell
Laboratories developed a prototype of such a device.
The Hewlett-Packard design would be a hybrid that contained
transistors made using conventional photolithography techniques with
an accompanying mesh of nanowire-connected switches.
"We've demonstrated a credible means for shrinking circuit density
without shrinking transistors," said Stan Williams, director of
quantum science research at H.P. Labs. The researchers have simulated
the design in the lab, and they are starting to build test chips in a
laboratory in Corvallis, Ore. They hope to have a working prototype
within a year.
The Hewlett-Packard researchers, who are based in Palo Alto, Calif.,
have extended the Stony Brook concept and applied it to a class of
computer chips known as field programmable gate arrays, or FPGA. FPGA
chips are widely used in the computer industry to design prototype
circuits that can later be manufactured less expensively.
To gain flexibility, the FPGA chips use large numbers of transistors
that can be reconfigured into an infinite array of different
circuits. Therefore the flexibility entails much higher cost, and the
circuits are not routinely used in final products, but rather in
development systems.
The Stony Brook and H.P. design, however, would make it possible to
build FPGA circuits that are one-eighth to one-tenth the scale of
today's commercial chips. Moreover, they would have the advantage of
consuming far less power than conventional microchips because the
molecular computing switches are nonvolatile - that is, they consume
power only when switching from one state to another.
Such a breakthrough would allow the flexible FPGA-style chips to be
used routinely in consumer products manufactured by the tens of
millions. It is this advance that could lead to the ability to modify
or upgrade the circuitry of standard consumer electronics products
already in use.
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