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What's different about next-gen transistors

semiengineering.com

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Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#51
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually the alternatives switch much faster, such as GaAs

Sorry, what’s a GaAs?

Gallium Arsenide. Semiconductor with certain nicer properties than silicon that allow it to switch faster and have a larger operating temperature at the cost being harder and more expensive to manufacture. That's a fairly big caveat, being a lot of the reason why silicon is so ubiquitous, relegating adoption of other semiconductors to more niche applications where their more optimal properties are a necessity.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#52
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memristor and analogue processors to accelerate ML are doing this. Neural networks are ok with operations on noisy, analogue states. Analogue operations such as op-amp multiplication are more power hungry than individual digital gates, but some are less power hungry than digital multipliers which use thousands of gates. For digital, noise-free logic, it's generally more power efficient and physically simpler to have…

> Memristor and analogue processors to accelerate ML are doing this. Neural networks are ok with operations on noisy, analogue states. Analogue operations such as op-amp multiplication are more power hungry than individual digital gates, but some are less power hungry than digital multipliers which use thousands of gates. I checked Mouser just now and memristors are not in stock: https://www.mouser.com/c/?q=memristor…

In-memory computing is just barely in active research. Unlike quantistors, memristors are being built (and have already been built) in many research laboratories.

If you are interested in learning, the idea of memristors (and other computational memory technology) is not to replace traditional memory, but rather to augment small portions of it with increased/additional computational functionality.

For example, you could add a (relatively speaking) extremely small number of memristors to an existing memory module, load two matrices into that area of memory, and reading from the adjacent region of memory would immediately yield the result of multiplying those two matrices. If you could simply instruct the RAM module where the existing data lies, this would be an immense boost in efficiency to AI/deep learning prediction algorithms. Here is a video explanation of how this could be use to perform matrix vector multiplication in O(1): https://youtu.be/30K5i8bdiyg?t=1492 .

That video mentions later that something similar can be used in solving linear and partial differential equations. Applications for deep learning training is discussed at 40:20 .

You'll notice everything discussed in the keynote has experimental results. At 41:27, he mentions that you can actually send images to their memristor chip over their website . Though the link is unfortunately dead, it definitely worked, and was in fact performing neural network computations using memristors over the network.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#53
post #45

There's a lot coming down the pipe in term of next-gen components in the SOI and 3D subthreshold world, ULP (ultra-low power), MEMS (pretty much everything you find in your phone these days, outside of the CPU itself), 3D integration, the problem is summarizing it in a neat little comment. Memristors are huge, and are going to be, huge-er still. World changing huge. Which ties in to new analogue design techniques. 3D…

Has there been an acronym shift? MEMS used to mean mechanical contrivances like dlp mirrors. Memristors are surely different?

MEMS means Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, iow. a category of a type of sensor/actor elements that work with mechanical effects but are minuscule and often constructed using lithographic processes, not milled or the like.

Memristors are a specific electric component.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

While MEMS is already huge and still getting way bigger, memristors ain't really a thing yet.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#54
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been an acronym shift? MEMS used to mean mechanical contrivances like dlp mirrors. Memristors are surely different?

MEMS means Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, iow. a category of a type of sensor/actor elements that work with mechanical effects but are minuscule and often constructed using lithographic processes, not milled or the like. Memristors are a specific electric component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor While MEMS is already huge and still getting way…

Comments felt like they conflated them. Also what are all the MEMS chips in phones? Another element of the threads is they're all over phone builds. The accelerometer? The lens systems?

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#55

So carbon atoms are spaced about 0.15 nm apart in carbon metal. So a 3nm process is about 20 carbon atoms. Impressive.

It's just a name. No actual features are 3nm specifically.

We always have this discussion in these threads. There should be a HN wiki for these things. It's not just a name because it does measure true progress over time. We should just use density of transistors per area because that is increasing at the same rate as the name of the process is decreasing. It's just been done in other ways than just shrinking every feature. This article is about one of those steps in the design of the transistor that allows for that density increase. That 3 nanometers is not a feature size doesn't mean that it's "just marketing" either like it's often claimed. The process node scale does measure true progress. It's just unfortunate that we ended up with feature size instead of density for that scale because of historic reasons.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4

That's super informative, much better than any other video or article I found, thanks!

Its one of those presentations I come back to and re-watch every now and then, wish there was a 202x version of it.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at IBM's history you can see how reliability and the ability to manufacture components in quantity played a huge role in the adaptation of both. Bell Lab's early point contact ones weren't manufacturable. IBM didn't move to proper ICs until 1970 with the System/370 because anything they made including the low end would be sold in quantities too high for ICs before then (System/360 Models 85 and 195 preced…

So memristors are almost here, is that what you're saying?

No idea. For example, between the development of core memory and DRAM there were a host of technologies they tried because core is slow and expensive to manufacture. The best they did for speed was called thin-film, and they sold only two systems with it, upgrades of the System 360 Model 91 supercomputer named the Model 95. They had 1 MiB of it and 4 MiB of core, sold to NASA, the first Model 91 customer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/360_Model_91

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MEMS means Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, iow. a category of a type of sensor/actor elements that work with mechanical effects but are minuscule and often constructed using lithographic processes, not milled or the like. Memristors are a specific electric component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectromechanical_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor While MEMS is already huge and still getting way…

Comments felt like they conflated them. Also what are all the MEMS chips in phones? Another element of the threads is they're all over phone builds. The accelerometer? The lens systems?

Most often microphones, but yes also IMUs which provide, among other things, the acceleration data. Lens system less so, at least to my knowledge.

Re: What's different about next-gen transistors

#59
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a name. No actual features are 3nm specifically.

We always have this discussion in these threads. There should be a HN wiki for these things. It's not just a name because it does measure true progress over time. We should just use density of transistors per area because that is increasing at the same rate as the name of the process is decreasing. It's just been done in other ways than just shrinking every feature. This article is about one of those steps in the des…

Just because it has meaning doesn't mean it's not just a name unrelated to the feature size it appears to refer to. I never said it's "just marketing", it does have meaning, but that meaning is not a length. It measures progress, but no longer measures feature size.
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