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!"

Overclocking made safer.

[Television Set]

Think about it... overheat a chip, it heals itself.

Sounds good to me

[no1here]

So what does this really mean for computers? And why design a chip? Can't it design itself. You give it all the resources it will need, tell it what to do, and it determines how to best configure itself. And then it could reconfigure itself to better adapt.

P.S. First post. :)

Re:Overclocking made safer.

[dnoyeb]

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.

Re:Obiligatory 2001 Quote...

[Pharmboy]

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".

eBONDAGE, eDRM, eVIBRATORS

[t_allardyce]

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 interaction. Why call it eFUSE? probably because they have marketing idiots.

is this going to be used for DRM? if the chip detects tampering, could the same fuses that work in this system could be hijacked by the DRM to destroy the chip? What are the security implications of this? could someone fire off the fuses remotely?

Who benefits really?

[hashwolf]

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.

Radiation hardness?

[kievit]

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.)

FPGAs?

[andreyw]

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.

Re:Download an MP3, Blow Up your CPU?

[jc42]

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 will execute the commands to burn out the appropriate piece of the cpu chip, which turned out to send a "disable" signal to the circuitry that you just paid for.