New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude. 139
First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes "A paywalled article in the "Nature Materials" journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes 'to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.' Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today."
Re:should be on the market in five years or less (Score:3, Informative)
You do understand that somebody has to do groundwork before anything can be made in large scale. Even first silicon transistors where originally just proof of concepts until engineers where able to make manufacturing process around it.
Re:I thought latency was the main issue? (Score:4, Informative)
since having your signal only travel 0.1 mm per clock pulse makes it rather hard to get the data around...
There's still plenty of fixed-function hardware around (wlan chipsets, even though they're somewhat programmable) for which this might not be a major issue.
Re:I thought latency was the main issue? (Score:4, Informative)
Latency is a problem certainly, but there's still some headroom. With a pipelined processor the signal doesn't have to propagate further than the next stage (ok that simplifies it a bit). At the moment, a top end processor is of order 1cm across (and now that's mostly cache and graphics), and even quite substantial ARM cores are down into the fairly small number of mm.
I suspect that unlike in the good old days, much like increasing transistor count no longer increases performance linearly, the same will go with clock speed once the processor is around one wavelength across.
One hypothetical way would be to have lots of really tiny, simple processors which are 0.01mm across, and then juice them up to 3THz.
Re:Hummm... (Score:5, Informative)
I taught we already had gallium-arsenide transistors. The problem is cost as it is reserved for application where power enveloppe is very thin (earing aids) and switching speed is critical (telecom equipment).
Another problem with GaAs and other III-V semiconductors is that they do not scale well, and so you can not pack as many transistors on a chip, and so they just can not compete with silicon in logic. They are quite useful for other applications, but not in your computer. Besides the low temperature hurdle, it's not clear if these new materials will face the same cost and scalability problems as III-Vs.