Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist
of the IBM Laptop Battery First post by: www.itsbattery.com
Few experts believe the customary ways of improving computer chips will go on forever. IBM has been particularly vocal about the issue, and on Monday is disclosing what it believes are breakthroughs in three promising areas of research.
One challenge is to come up with new materials and structures for transistors that can stand in for silicon, the inexpensive, ubiquitous material used to make most chips. The other is to integrate those inventions with the existing machines, techniques and factories used to fabricate chips on silicon wafers.
IBM’s announcements, described in research papers being introduced at a technical conference in Washington D.C., focus largely on the latter problem. “What usually kills a new technology is that it is unable to be integrated with traditional materials,” says Bernie Meyerson, a prominent figure in IBM’s research operations who holds the title of fellow.
Why does anything need to change? It’s all about continuing the kinds of progress that allowed iPods to store entire music libraries and laptop PCs with batteries such as IBM ThinkPad 240Z battery, IBM ThinkPad A30 battery, IBM ThinkPad A31 battery, IBM ThinkPad 600 battery, IBM 02K7016 battery, IBM ThinkPad G40 battery, IBM 08K8026 battery, IBM ThinkPad T21 battery, IBM ThinkPad T20 battery, IBM ThinkPad X61 battery to calculate as fast as the room-sized machines of past decades.
That race has long equated to shrinking the size of transistors and other components on chips. The pace of progress, usually described as doubling the number of transistors on a similarly sized chip every two years or so, is called Moore’s Law (after the co-founder of Intel, who described the pace of innovation in a famous paper).
The miniaturization brought three kinds of benefits. Because each transistor took up less space on a chip, the cost of each function declined. As components got smaller and closer together, and companies increased the frequency of the timing pulses on chips, circuitry worked faster. And power consumption also tended to decline, in part because companies kept reducing the voltage needed to drive circuitry.
But problems emerged early in the last decade. Higher operating frequencies began to consume too much power and generate too much heat, especially as consumers began to gravitate toward battery-operated portable PCs. And once elements in transistors shrunk to a certain size they began to leak current, adding to the power-consumption problems.
Engineers responded by changing some key materials and designs for making conventional silicon transistors, which appears to be working fine for chips now just hitting the market. Intel, for example, is introducing a novel three-dimensional transistor design into its latest microprocessors, which have circuit dimensions measured at 22 nanometers, or billionths of a meter.
But none of those approaches will work, Meyerson says, once circuitry shrinks to around seven nanometers. “We can debate if it’s in five years or ten years but the game is over,” he says.
One way of changing the game dramatically is by replacing silicon for some functions with carbon, using microscopic structures called nanotubes. One of the IBM papers being disclosed Monday at the International Electron Devices Meeting describes the company’s success in fabricating what it says is the first carbon nanotube transistor rated at less than 10 nanometers.
The tiny device, the company says, easily outperforms the best competing silicon-based devices by some key metrics. It was built by “growing” the carbon structures, Meyerson says, on wafers with the standard 200-millimeter diameters used in many semiconductor factories.
Another paper focuses on graphene, a film created from material that is essentially the same as found in pencil leads. That film is typically just a single atom thick, a size that has promising potential for saving space in semiconductors. (Graphene, for various reasons, tends to be better suited for radio communications chps than other applications).
Meyerson says the IBM engineers came up with a way to invert the processing steps other reseachers have used in creating graphene transistors, and created the components on a conventional 200-millimeter production line. “It’s the first time we’ve done these very conventionally,” Meyerson says.
A third IBM paper focuses on an invention by the company called “racetrack memory,” which is a candidiate to replace data-storage technologies like the flash memory used in iPhones and other consumer devices. The underlying idea is to record or read data using microscopic magnets that are shifted along loops of tiny wiring, or nanowires.
In their latest work, IBM researchers demonstrated devices with an array of 256 such magnetized racetracks, again produced in combination with 200-millimeter semiconductor wafers.
Meyerson won’t predict when any of these inventions will arrive. For one thing, semiconductor makers have proved adept at extending conventional silicon-based technologies much longer than was once believed possible.
Another issue is companies don’t want to tip their hands too soon. “People will be quietly talking about things that are not silicon,” Meyerson says. “It’s the 900-pound gorilla in the room.”
Intel, as it happens, is also using the conference called IEDM to discuss the trend toward what it calls “heterogeneous scaling,” which adds new materials along with the basic practice of shrinking transistors.
Mark Bohr, who leads development of Intel’s chip-production recipes and is speaking at the event, argues in a technical paper that inventions like carbon nanotubes and graphene will bring benefits in the future–but most likely in narrower applications than the kinds of general-purpose transistors that have been used so broadly in microprocessors, memory chips and other mainstream products.
A set of Bohr’s foils, however, ends on an optimistic note: “It’s a wonderful time to be a semiconductor chef when you have so many spices available to you.”
Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said a nanometer is a billionth of millimeter.
Samsung NP900X3A Ac Adapter
0 comments:
Post a Comment