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."
Hummm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Dr. Hermann Dürr (Score:3, Insightful)
Fucking slashdot, with its lack of support for basic unicode. What is this? 1996?
Re:Why FTL? (Score:0, Insightful)
Well at least the clock signal needs to get through the whole chip, yes.
Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Back in the days, when slashdot...
That's a bit of an obvious troll coming from someone with a seven digit UID... :p
Re:Why FTL? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the clock signal needs to time between two connecting flip flops nothing more. It's extremely common (i.e. it's about 5% of my job) to have to change the design in order to achieve this local clocking requirement.
That's without having multiple asynchronous clocks on a single chip.
Or asynchronous logic
Even when you need to do very long paths it's called a clock tree for a reason you can have a 1GHz clock that takes several ns to get from its source PLL to its destination flop because the delay through the tree to all the leaf nodes is matched. that is a 1ns period clock can take 4ns to get from the source to the destination, and that's all fine because as long as it's the same 4ns... ;-)
Now things get harder when different bits of the chip have silicon that runs at different speeds so you can't balance the tree like you'd like to, but that's what makes this job interesting