Engineers Create Tiny Wires WIth Old Technique 27
Gamp writes with this interesting snippet: "As microprocessors have shrunk, the wiring between them hasn't always kept up. But engineers at the University of Illinois are changing that with a decades-old metalworking technique. It's called electrodeposition. It's basically the same process used in electroplating, but instead of depositing metal on a surface, as when trying to make a gold-plated piece of jewelry, the metal is deposited in a wire. 'People weren't thinking about how to fabricate a wire in three dimensional space,' said Min-Feng Yu, a professor of mechanical science and engineering."
Re:transistor density (Score:5, Interesting)
Any impact on Moore's Law?
Well, according to TFA:
Scaled up to industrial size, the method could save microprocessor companies a lot of money, Yu said, because about 30% of the space in a microchip wafer is taken up by the wires between components
Given that, I'm going to tentatively answer your question with a "yes."
Re:transistor density (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically a bit different issue than the way Moore phrased it, but conceptually could have some related effects. Moore was predicting an increase in transistor density of integrated circuits (ICs), while this work scales down the size of interconnects between separate ICs. That could have the same effect of increasing overall transistor density for an electronic component, but is a somewhat different than increasing transistor density within a single IC. For example, it won't allow CPUs to pack transistors more densely, because CPUs are already a single IC.
Article with pictures (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19181-growyourown-approach-to-wiring-3d-chips.html [newscientist.com]
Re:transistor density (Score:3, Interesting)
It could be more tightly related than that, but it depends on how scalable and reliable it is. Rather than predicting an increase in transistor density, Moore actually predicted an increase in transistor density at a fixed price-point. This is the same as a reducing price-point for a given transistor budget.
So one way to increase power would be to assemble processors out of smaller units. If each unit is an IC with a fixed transistor budget and this provides a reliable and scalable way to assemble those ICs into chips then it could have quite a large impact on the growth of processor performance.