‘HIGH-RISE’ CHIP COULD SHRINK SUPERCOMPUTERS
At a seminar in San Francisco, a Stanford College group exposed how to develop skyscraper chips that could leapfrog the efficiency of the single-story reasoning and memory chips on today's circuit cards.Those circuit cards resemble busy cities where reasoning chips compute and memory chips store information. But when the computer system obtains busy, the cables connecting reasoning and memory can obtain obstructed.The new approach would certainly finish these jams by building layers of reasoning atop layers of memory to produce a firmly adjoined skyscraper chip.
Many thousands of nanoscale digital "elevators" would certainly move information in between the layers a lot much faster, using much less electrical power, compared to the bottleneck-prone cables connecting single-story reasoning and memory chips today.
The work is led by Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford partner teacher of electric design and of computer system scientific research, and H.-S. Philip Wong, a teacher in Stanford's Institution of Design. They explain their new skyscraper chip architecture in a paper provided at the IEEE Worldwide Electron Devices Meeting on December 15-17.
THREE BREAKTHROUGHS
The first advancement is a brand-new technology for producing transistors, those tiny entrances that switch electrical power on and off to produce electronic zeroes and ones. The second is a brand-new kind of computer system memory that provides itself to multi-story construction. The 3rd is a method to develop these new reasoning and memory technologies right into skyscraper frameworks in a radically various way compared to previous initiatives to pile chips."This research goes to a very early phase, but our design and construction methods are scalable," Mitra says. "With further development this architecture could lead to computing efficiency that's a lot, a lot higher than anything available today."
Wong says the model chip revealed at IEDM demonstrates how to put reasoning and memory with each other right into three-dimensional frameworks that can be mass-produced.
"Standard shift is an overused idea, but here it's appropriate," Wong says. "With this new architecture, electronic devices manufacturers could put the power of a supercomputer in your hand."
