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Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

economist.com

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Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#51

Post by sevensor »

avs733 wrote: post #41
sevensor wrote: post #40

Headline stuck me funny; I was working in ion implantation 20 years ago. Of course they’re talking about lithography, because those guys are the fighter pilots / first violinists of semiconductor manufacturing, they get all the attention.

This is such a good analogy. Implant and thin film deposition never gets any respect…

Seriously! Although I’d say the most undervalued is wet processing. It’s incredible how much art and science go into not leaving water spots. Not to mention cleaning up other people’s messes.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#52

Post by artemonster »

TwoPhonesOneKid wrote: post #50
almostgotcaught wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you can absolutely make specialized chips proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens? > smaller process size prototypes around no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).

> no there aren't. there just aren't. You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

This is highly stupid argument, honestly. burden of proof lies on people that make idiot claims

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#53

Post by rowanG077 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42
fooker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs. I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around. Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes…

Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling. Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor tha…

That is if your problem is parallelizable. There are a ton of sequential problems that are hard or impossible to break up.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#54

Post by voxic11 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #53
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling. Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor tha…

That is if your problem is parallelizable. There are a ton of sequential problems that are hard or impossible to break up.

What would be an example that the NSA would be interested in?

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#55

Post by voxic11 »

TwoPhonesOneKid wrote: post #50
almostgotcaught wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you can absolutely make specialized chips proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens? > smaller process size prototypes around no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).

> no there aren't. there just aren't. You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

You can always turn a claim into a logically equivalent claim of the non-existence of any counterexamples.

    “For every instance, e equals mc²”
is logically equivalent to

    “There is no instance where e does not equal mc².”
That combined with your belief that claims of non-existence can't be held with any degree of certainty means you believe that no claim can ever be held with any degree of certainty. Which is not a very interesting insight.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#56

Post by gorkish »

If you want to make features tinier than EUV allows, you do what you have done for the last few decades and make them directly, but real slow and costly, with electron beams. IMO at some point it seems likely that someone will simply decide to brute force e beam litho up to mass production rates.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#57

Post by almostgotcaught »

TwoPhonesOneKid wrote: post #50
almostgotcaught wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, you can absolutely make specialized chips proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens? > smaller process size prototypes around no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).

> no there aren't. there just aren't. You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

> You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

I love condescension that is so petty it's laughable. As the commenters said below there are very well-understood precedents/principles that allow me to conclude "no" here eg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

So no it's not "impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something", we actually have a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to exactly that (it's called probability and statistics).

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#58

Post by rowanG077 »

voxic11 wrote: post #54
rowanG077 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is if your problem is parallelizable. There are a ton of sequential problems that are hard or impossible to break up.

What would be an example that the NSA would be interested in?

Well I'm not an NSA engineer but I can imagine complex real-time analysis of streaming data, think processing 400+GbE link data. It quickly becomes too much too store, analysis could impose sequential packet dependencies.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#59

Post by TwoPhonesOneKid »

voxic11 wrote: post #55
TwoPhonesOneKid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no there aren't. there just aren't. You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

You can always turn a claim into a logically equivalent claim of the non-existence of any counterexamples. “For every instance, e equals mc²” is logically equivalent to “There is no instance where e does not equal mc².” That combined with your belief that claims of non-existence can't be held with any degree of certainty means you believe that no claim can ever be held with any degree of certainty. Which is not a ver…

This is an equally unsupportable claim, though. This requires enumeration of the entire state of the universe, an impossibility. This is just the standard swan problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory). What you have is a model you're very confident in without the deductively-rational basis your diction implies.

People should really read more hume if they're going to weigh in on philosophy of science.

Re: Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator

#60

Post by TwoPhonesOneKid »

artemonster wrote: post #52
TwoPhonesOneKid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no there aren't. there just aren't. You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

This is highly stupid argument, honestly. burden of proof lies on people that make idiot claims

Hume is deeply disappointed in you.
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