Intel will uncork the company’s nanotechnology strategies at its developer conference next week in San Jose, Calif., shedding some light on the future of its chips.
Intel has Huge Nano Plans
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Couldn’t resist that!
I’v been in the chip biz >20yrs, & I can see the end in sight perhaps 10-20 more years of what is very familiar & getting too complicated, but that will probably be it for me.
As in the movie “The Graduate” I can recommend to any recent EE or Physics graduates out there as if they didn’t already know, “Nano technology”, next really big thing. I am not referring to sub 0.1u as the article suggests, but to the more interesting work at IBM labs in Zurich (IIRC). The really interesting stuff involves manufacturing at the atomic scale devices that can barely be understood, not just transistor substitutes but very different things.
Think of the Hard Disk being replaced by an atomic force needle that is arrayed out to some large no of heads & writing at much higher bit densities than even magnetic media is still promising, only there is no rotating disk so much lower latences.
Oh to be young again.
Ok, couldn’t resist that one, either
That atomic force needle “hard disk” (should call it a storage device, I guess, if no disk is involved
you’re talking about … would that use some kind of massively parallel array of heads for simultaneous – or whatever – access of bits/bytes/words/whatever? Sounds cool, no matter what!
Yes, the last I read a few months ago was that IBM was using 1024 needles each on its own cantilever ie up/down. This array will likely get much larger as it is just MEMs device std silicon manufacturing technology.
The chip does some sort of XY raster scan so there are some mechanical components (& latencies). Note that this is really the same idea they did some 10-20yrs ago when they wrote IBM in dot matrix format on tungsten surface, that took a while, & was hand guided atom by atom. Now all this is still just playthings for the luckier R/D guys but these can lead to real world products. Also the cantilevers use the MEMs technology used to make gyros, accelerometers (airbags etc), DMDs (mirror based overhead projectors)etc.
Combine bucky balls & tubes, MEMS, with funny transisters & what not, and the next 50yrs could be very interesting for the next generation whether its used for electronics or bio!
Less moving parts. High capacity. Durable removable media.
Right now we have computers that go down without cheap, removable media that’s big enough to hold a complete back-up of multi-gigabyte HDs (or today’s files) on one disc.
We also have HDs – while great – still built on fragile technology and they often die unexpectedly, taking all our data with it. And yet we are relying on computers more and more for our critical data each day.
When is the 80GB+ removable/rewritable media gonna be available? CD-RWs are starting to look like floppies with today’s storage demands. And solid-state HDs as cheap or cheaper than current cost per MB? When?
I hope soon…