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IBM Announces Chip Morphing Technology

Posted by CowboyNeal on Sat Jul 31, 2004 07:07 AM
from the self-fixing-problems dept.
IBM Hardware Technology
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has announced that it is now capable of producing self-healing chips. From the article: 'eFUSE works by combining software algorithms and microscopic electrical fuses, opposed to laser fuses, to produce chips that can regulate and adapt their own actions in response to changing conditions and system demands.' It goes on to say that the IBM system is more robust than previous methods, and that the chips are already in production. The future is here!"
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  • Think about it... overheat a chip, it heals itself.

    • Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dnoyeb (547705) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:26AM (#9851765) Homepage Journal
      Heal, lol. What did I miss? A fuse is something that interrupts a circuit permanently. Akin to gnawing off a leg.

      Reading their article, the big improvement is the leg has no chance to grow back.

      Sounds like total spin to claim that descruction of circuits is a healing process. I smell DRM all over this.
      • I agree.

        Using fuses seems best suited for small runs where your design is pretty fixed and you don't want to foot the bill for a custom chip mask. Like programmable logic arrays, etc...

        So if conditions change with the environment these chips are in, they blow some fuses to respond. If conditions change back to where they were before the chip blew fuses, oh well. Some sort of nonviolate ram seems more in order for "adaptive" technology, heck regular PC cmos adapts handily to new hard disks for instance.

      • "Sounds like total spin to claim that descruction of circuits is a healing process. I smell DRM all over this."

        So DRM smells like fried electronics?

      • We would do better to call them self-amputating chips.

        I doubt that DRM would be a driving factor, but I could see where a software security vulnerability might be exploitable to cause damage to the CPU.

        I could also see where a kernelmode DRM driver might seek to destroy CPU's used to rip CD's etc without permission... Many questions arise from this and how technology and content providers will reach a compromise. My own personal view is that such a compromise is becoming less and less possible.

        I think

    • Re:Overclocking made safer. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by vrmlknight (309019) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:45AM (#9851834) Homepage
      You can do that once... The main thing this helps is when there is a single failure in a production server so now when it happens you are able to schedule down time and then replace that component. Is like when you have your redundant hard drives one goes then you can replace it when you get a chance. (hopefully soon before you have another failure)
      • I think this is the most fair analogy I have seen yet after reading the article. Its sounds like the chip is just takeing the defective area out of the ciruit and working around the problem. It seems like a degraded mode on a disk array to me, sure your raid 5 array keeps running with the loss of one drive but the performance is not great.
  • Is this the basis for the PowerTune [eweek.com] technology either used in the 970FX or to be used in it? It supposedly automatically adjusts power consumption and processor speed based on how processor intensive the current operations are.

    This seems much different from the current speed stepping technologies as it doesn't scale down to a fixed MHz rating. That is, it isn't always 2.0Ghz during intensive operations and 1.2Ghz for non-intensive operations. /got nothing

  • Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rob.sharp (215152) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:16AM (#9851738) Homepage
    "I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen."

    • Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pharmboy (216950) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:38AM (#9851813) Journal
      How applicable. Nothing beats a technology that brings up images of either "2001" or "The Matrix". (insert eFuse Overlord joke here)

      But on a more serious note, while this sounds pretty cool, it still breaks down to this: If a portion of the chip is screwed up, eFuse will bypass it. If you bypass part of the chip, you will have lower performance. I can see where this would be good in enterprise computing *IF* the chip also *TELLS* you that it is messed up, so if a portion of the chip becomes defective, it will still operate until it can be replaced. This would be great for uptimes and in mission critical systems, but for overclocking desktop system, this seems pretty useless, here is why:

      Take a 2ghz chip. Overclock to 2.5ghz. Blow two eFuses (oops). Now chip at 2.5ghz functions as fast as a 2ghz chip. Clock back down, and it performs as fast as a 1.5ghz chip. Sell chip or system on eBay to someone without telling them eFuses are blown, screwing them over.

      Unless there is a way to test if the eFuses are blown, I can see some real problems on the used market for this kind of chip. This would also apply to "why is this server performing like crap?" situations. Of course, as long as the eFuses are not blown, but are instead just reordering its own logic for specific uses (web server only, database server, etc), this would be majorly kick ass offering a quazi-specific purpose system on the fly. Especially once you have a kernel module that can talk to it and tell it what kinds of changes in routing would be best for a given platform, telling it "this computer is used for $x only, route logic accordingly".
        • How about if it recognized that you were running say, SETI@Home, and it optimized itself to execute that algorithm faster?

          It would seem to me that this is exactly what the article seems to indicate. If what you are doing is not i/o, disk or memory intensive, but instead 98% cpu cycles (like seti@home or other distributed computing) then it would adjust. If you are rendering frames in a SGI fashion, it would change. If you are using it for streaming media box, adjust. The big questions are: How long d

  • Awesome (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Stevyn (691306)
    This sounds like an innovation above and beyond upping the clock speed and making a bigger heatsink. Take that pentium!

  • wish it were more descriptive (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tklive (755607) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:25AM (#9851762)
    while it does sound like a big step forward ,esp considering "eFUSE is technology independent, does not require introduction of new materials, tools or processes" . But how exactly is it selfhealing ?

    nothing is mentioned abt the redundancy required for the reroutings... its obvious not all kinds of faults can be handled this way. so, do they try to predict possible faults and build in workarounds.. or do they just use the natural design to handle whatever can be ? ....how does this affect the way they design circuits ... make more generic blocks etc ?..and maybe i didnt really understand the article...but isnt it more of a self correcting rather than self healing feature?

    wish the article had more info...
  • "eFUSE reroutes chip logic, much the way highway traffic patterns can be altered by opening and closing new lanes," said Bernard Meyerson...

    ...And much like the neurons in the brain? Doesn't his have rather large significance to AI, or artificial life, for that matter? If the IBM solution is part software, who is to say that the software cannot be intelligent?

  • With a limit? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by usefool (798755) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:30AM (#9851780) Homepage
    Surely a chip cannot keep self-healing indefinitely can't it?

    If it's capable of re-routing certain path when something went wrong, it'll eventually run out of alternative path, or the performance will be degraded to next to useless.

    However it's certainly a good pre-emptive tool for mission critical machines, provided it has a way of informing the admin that it's dying, rather than secretly degrading.
  • I'd seen a few or more articles about other dynamically reconfigurable chips such as this [emediawire.com] until now. In which point is IBM's one different from others? Making a single chip autonomic in itself is only about packing, I suppose.

  • On-Chip Sparing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Detritus (11846) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:37AM (#9851811) Homepage
    Sounds like it is most useful for permanently reconfiguring a chip to use spare functional units after problems are detected with the currently selected functional units.

  • Default Color Link (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:39AM (#9851816)

    Before that other guy does it:

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/30/220256 &tid=136&tid=137&tid=126 [slashdot.org]

  • Article lacking detail... but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 3seas (184403) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:44AM (#9851828) Homepage Journal
    What this sounds like is a chip production success/failure rate improvement. As well as providing a bit more flexability in going from teh drawing board (design/theory) to production (testing/reality).

    I think it is very interesting that they are using something that was considered to be bad in chip reality (electromigration), as a positive thing.

    This is, in analogy, like how our bodies exist symboticly with many different germs and such, for without we'd die alot sooner.

    I don't think what the article is talking about is anything like reprogrammable chips (FPGAs) as some may think by reading the article, but rather something automatically used once between the chip production line and its actual ongoing system use to auto test and correct any production anomolies per chip. (is this where we say bye bye Neo?)

  • Oh yeah, PCBs go bad all the time. Wait, processors and PCBs are probably the most reliable things in all of our electronics. When a processor or PCB breaks, it's due to something that these chips would not be able to 'self-heal', like horrible electrical damage or overheating. How about a *true* self healing HD or optical media (CD/DVD).

    Maybe in a much larger scale, perhaps a motherboard that has reprogrammable chips, so that when your modem burns out from a power surge, it can reprogram some other mod
    • True for PCs, but an IBM server isn't anything close to a PC. considering almost all IBM i & p series servers are shipped with multiple deactivated processors as well as seperate processor cards to handle raw IO processing this is more of a RAID type thing. The purpose of RAID isn't to prevent the drive from failing but allow you to limp along until you can swap the drive. Also, remember that the IBM "big iron" has hot-spare, hot-swappable EVERYTHING...CPU, RAM, PCI cards, controllers, disks...
    • I tend to agree for the most part.

      But let's imagine you have a cluster with 1024 diskless nodes. At that scale, you need a ridiculously high per-node mtbf just to get anything done before your cluster breaks down. This might be a lot simpler and cheaper than trying to manage redundancy at higher levels.

      Or maybe you're building a chip to control antilock braking, or for that matter an airliner or a space ship. Even if the odds of braking something handled by this mechanism are fairly low, it might st

  • wow, now they've invented the 'eFUSE' maybe they could invent the 'eLAMP' and 'eDIODE' and 'eTRANSISTOR' - amazing 'e' components that can be controlled electronically!!

    i know on-chip fuses (PROM?) have been around before and this seems to basically just be the same thing but more reliable and with 'e' on the end which im guessing stands for electromigration, which AFAIK is a problem with very small paths on chips that get screwed up by the flow of electrons and some sort of ionic-bondage-thingy interactio

  • Potentially disastrous for desktop CPU's (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wamatt (782485) on Saturday July 31 2004, @07:56AM (#9851871) Homepage
    Lets hope IBM has the for-sight to ensure that the eFuse feature cannot be controlled by software.

    Think about the latest worm going around taking your nice new 3200Mhz processor to an effective 100mhz by blowing all the fuses and crippling it.

    I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.

    • I would guess though, because of the high R&D costs involved, this will only ever see its way into high-end servers.

      You have a poor grasp on basic economics. If something costed a lot in R&D, that is a good reason to mass produce it to spread the R&D costs over a lot of units. The only reason why something is limited to high-end products is that the MANUFACTURING costs are high and the article explicitely states that the fuses are added at no additional cost. So the only logical thing for IBM

  • Argh! (Score:2, Informative)

    by PKC Jess (797453)
    I know this is slightly offtopic, but how many people have ever actually BEEN to the IT section of slashdot? It hurts the eyes! On a more ontopic note, I am tres excited about this technology and I for one will keep a sharp eye on it. Go self healing technology!
    • The color scheme is terrible, yeah.

      A friend of mine pointed out that if you change the "it." in the URL to say... "games." it works fine, and is readable.
  • Nothing new here. Virage Logic Corporation [viragelogic.com] has had these designs on the shelf for their Self-Test and Repair (STAR) Memory System for some time now [google.com]. It has been licensed to quite a few parties already for use in the various fabs so this is already being done.

    Look through the website. IBM is even a customer.

  • Who benefits really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hashwolf (520572) on Saturday July 31 2004, @08:11AM (#9851912)
    When batches of silicon chips are made a number of them are always defective.

    This technology is more beneficial for IBM than for us because it will allow IBM to SELL defective-but-self-repairable chips instead of SCRAPPING them. Because of this, it is highly probable that there will be no way end users will be able to garner info about to what extent the chip has already repaired itself.

    If this is the case IBM will probably take one of the following roads:
    1) Continue with the current manufacturing standards - this would yield chips with more longevity.
    2) Manufacture chips with less stringent (and hence cheaper) manufacturing standards - although this would yield more defective chips, these won't be thrown away since they can self repair; they will be sold instead!

    I really hope it's not option #2 they chose.

    • They already do #2 with DRAM chips, to keep the yields at reasonable levels. Although I think they have to be tested and repaired before they are shipped from the factory.

  • Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by iansmith (444117) on Saturday July 31 2004, @08:47AM (#9852026) Homepage
    The first thought that entered my head when I read this was, "Great... now we can have hardware that can be designed to self-destruct on demand." Imagine you get sold a CPU with an expiry date... software licences for hardware, the old you don't own the chip but are just renting it.

    IBM better be REAL carefull with this too. If it's possible to fool the chip into blowing these fuses, a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.

    As others mentioned, it is a neat trick, but a solution in search of a problem. CPU's just don't fail all that often to need something like this.
    • Older geeks will remember all the stories back in the 70's about people who paid big bucks for some fantastic new feature in IBM's cpus, and watched the IBM guy come over and "install" it by clipping a jumper wire or two on a board.

      We're probably going to be hearing a lot more of those stories in the future as a result of this development. Except that the IBM guy won't have to actually come over and clip anything. They'll be able to do it across the Net by asking you to download an Install program, which
    • a virus could potentially damage millions of computers in a day of spreading.

      We already live in that world. Viruses can already in theory toast BIOSes by flashing them with crap, or (equivalently for most people) destroying the OS. This new tech really wouldn't change anything (and BIOS destruction is likely to be "lower hanging fruit" for a while yet).

  • Wait for the exploits (Score:4, Funny)

    by mangu (126918) on Saturday July 31 2004, @08:48AM (#9852033)
    So, will we see a day when your computer catches a virus that transforms that gazillion GHz CPU into a 2 MHz 6502?

  • Memory - not logic (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Efuse and laser fuse are technologies for repairing memory defects, not for repairing logic defects.

    From the article, it appears this innovation applies to the embedded memory on a logic chip:
    "...all 90 nanometer custom chips, including those designed with IBM's advanced embedded DRAM technology"
  • How long before an emergent intelligence develops?
  • Maybe this technology could be useful to make chips which can survive in radioactive environments like particle detectors in accelator laboratories or in satellites? (And if that is so then the military is probably also interested, to use them in battlefield drones.)
  • Seems to me this will lead to lazy production practices, not better-built chips. Maybe it's needed in order to keep pushing the Moore's Law marketing vision.

  • FPGAs? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by andreyw (798182)
    I was thinking about blowing away some money on a large FPGA and associated hardware and software.

    I think it shouldn't be that mutch of an issues to program some part of the FPGA with the logic to reprogram the rest?

    And start from there. Damn, this sounds so uber-call. Retargatable and reprogrammable logic really blends the line between software and hardware.
  • Wonder Processor Powers: ACTIVATE!
    Shape of: A Laser Fuse!
    Form of: A Morphing Microchip, uh, made out of ICE!

  • When does this happen in the movie? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Saturday July 31 2004, @11:34AM (#9852790)
    The future is here!

    Dark Helmet: "What happened to then?"
    Col. Sanders: "We passed it."
    Dark Helmet: "When?"
    Col. Sanders: "Just now. We're at now, now."
    Dark Helmet: "Go back to then."
    Col. Sanders: "When?"
    Dark Helmet: "Now."
    Col. Sanders: "Now?"
    Dark Helmet: "Now!"
    Col. Sanders: "I can't."
    Dark Helmet: "Why?"
    Col. Sanders: "We missed it."
    Dark Helmet: "When?"
    Col. Sanders: "Just now."
    Dark Helmet: "When will then be now?"
    Col. Sanders: "Soon."

  • The future is here!

    No, it's not! It won't be here for another three... oh, never mind. Now it is here.

    steve
  • Imagine the fun we'll have when viruses can actually alter the router, switch and firewall hardware designed to protect us from the viruses.

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