IBM Announces Chip Morphing 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!"

Awesome

[Stevyn]

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

[tklive]

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...

Artificial Intelligence/Life

[Ceriel Nosforit]

"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?

[usefool]

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.

On-Chip Sparing

[Detritus]

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.

Article lacking detail... but...

[3seas]

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?)

Re:Overclocking made safer.

[vrmlknight]

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)

Potentially disastrous for desktop CPU's

[wamatt]

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.

Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU?

[iansmith]

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.

Memory - not logic

[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"

Precisely. Not self-healing.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just what I was thinking. It sounds like this can only be used to incorporate some redundancy.

Self-healing would be something completely different, imho -- the ability to rebuild damaged circuitry from some kind of schematic or remaining information, or maybe the ability to fall back to general instructions on the main CPU if a specialist unit like a GPU failed.

Re:if it aint broke...

[mabhatter654]

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...

Re:Overclocking made safer.

[phats garage]

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.

It is worth noting that it seems the real breakthrough is in the actual improvement in fuse technology (from the article):

• "In the old days, people tried to do this by basically blowing the fuse up by coursing a certain amount of current in it and causing it to rupture. The problem with that mode of opening up a fuse is that there is no place for the debris to go. So it can redeposit on the fuse and cause a previously open fuse to act like it's closed," he said.

  By avoiding the rupture, IBM claims to have perfected a technique to harnesses electromigration and uses it to program a fuse without damaging other parts of the chip.

Maybe its just the press release that slants this toward being "adaptive" technology.