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Technology

Chicken-Feather Chips 240

Posted by timothy from the barnyard-tech dept.
gtaylor writes "The Washington Post reports that University of Delaware chemical engineer proposes to replace silicon with chicken feather composites -- since the feathers apparently make the electrons fly. (Unlike turkeys.)"
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Chicken-Feather Chips More

Chicken-Feather Chips

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  • What? (Score:3, Funny)

    by SpatchMonkey ( 300000 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:43AM (#3842783) Journal
    April 1st was months back. What nonsense is this?

    The whole point of using silicon is it's semiconducting capabilities. You just don't get that from 'chicken feathers'.
    • The whole point of using silicon is it's semiconducting capabilities. You just don't get that from 'chicken feathers'.

      The whole point of research is to not assume that one already knows everything. (Though I do know silicon isn't the only material with semiconducting properties.)

    • RTFA Wiseguy, you might have learned something.

      "Wool's team took chicken feathers and plant oils and molded them into a composite material that approximates the shape and feel of silicon. When the researchers tested it for speed, they found that the composite allowed movement at about twice the rate of silicon."

      Even in the article, the guy admits it sounds strange and somewhat crazy, But as the ariticle says, and excerpt above ques to, their are researching for a replacement to silicon, and better yet, a replacement that can out perform silicon. The article also goeson to state that there are other 'Alternatives' in the works, and that this idea might not even, ahem, 'Fly', and even if it does, it won't be for years. So rest assured, we all don't have to race out and find ourselves any 'Foster Farms [fosterfarms.com]' case badges anytime soon.
      • RTFA Wiseguy, you might have learned something.

        Like what? The article contains no useful information whatsoever. The article is probably a prank (or the result of a prank) or written by someone without any technical background.

        Take this for example: feathers are strong but light, mainly due to their high air content.

        Feather are strong because of their air content? I find it very hard to believe that someone would have as little grasp on static as this. This sort of nonsense is all over the article. It better be a joke.

        • Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Knoxvill3 ( 578169 )
          Why should it be a joke? Because the Author of the Article didn't give you, the reader enough scientific fact to hold up the person's discovery that the author was reporting on?

          "The article is probably a prank (or the result of a prank) or written by someone without any technical background."

          As possible as that is, according to my calendar, it is the 8th of July, and not the 1st of April, and the article resides on the Washington Post, oh whom, to the best of my knowledge, aren't ones to Pranks and/or Sarcasitic Articles and Stories in the Fashion of what one might find on the onion.com.

          But what I find so odd on this subject is everyone's close-minded'ness on this subject. Why can't a solution, comprised of other materials, including chicken feathers, but held to the same precious light as silicone? The majority of posts I've read so far gives me the feeling there's some Silicone union in effect, and if anyone has any idea of something possibly better, then it's the union's job to send those comments and ideas by way of Hoffa. =P

          Anyways, I agree, the article was not the strongest one ever written, but engage the brain's a bit more people, if your not convienced, hunt around a bit and see what other information you can discover about this before you jump here and make a foolish comment just to get Karma points.

          • You have a point, I mean, people laughed at the Wight Brothers and at John Logie-Baird and probably many other "crazy inventors"....

            There's probably nothing in this, but on the other hand, tere just might be...

  • Opens up whole new marketing opportunities... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Smeg}{ead ( 71770 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:43AM (#3842785)
    Would you like your Pentium in Original or Extra Crispy?
  • It'll add a whole new dimension to pr0n ;)

  • Awesome (Score:3, Funny)

    by CaffeineAddict2001 ( 518485 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:44AM (#3842791)
    Can you imagine what Chicken Run 2 will look like?
  • Thunderchicken (a new processor from AMD) 1700 million clucks per second !! yuck yuck yuck
  • Too bad they just genetically engineered featherless chickens.... http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_2 000000/2000003.stm Doh!
  • KFC and IBM, anyone? I'm sure that KFC has a surplus of feathers.

    Or maybe, just rename to Kentucy Fried Computers?

    But then, it could cause problems.

    I, for one, could see a clash between computer makers and pillow makers.

    And do we really need the trouble that the animal rights protestors would cause?
  • Hmm, given that most of the DelMarVa (Delaware Maryland Virginia) peninsula is owned by either Dow Chemical or Perdue this makes perfect sense ;).

  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by littleRedFriend ( 456491 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:47AM (#3842820)
    Mc Donalds recently replaced the chicken burger by an artificial silicon-based meat substitute.
  • ...because that's about all Delaware produces, besides Extacy...

  • Very scientific article ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:48AM (#3842843) Homepage Journal
    The chicken-feather microchip is not as weird as it sounds. A microchip is basically a wafer of silicon inscribed with a dense maze of transistors. For the chip to do its computational magic, electric signals have to travel across these transistors.

    These signals travel faster in the presence of some materials than others. Air, for instance, allows the fastest movement of all, because it provides essentially no resistance. When traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.

    So what are they saying? Air offers no electrical resistance? Last I heard, air was one of the best insulators around. Or did they perchance confuse resistance with the dielectric value?

    • Re:Very scientific article ... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @12:03PM (#3842971) Journal
      hen traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.

      So what are they saying? Air offers no electrical resistance? Last I heard, air was one of the best insulators around. Or did they perchance confuse resistance with the dielectric value?

      Yes, they confused resistance with dilectric value. The phenomenon described is the the slowing of propogation of signals in a wire surrounded by a material of high dilectric constant.

      What puzzles me is the description of this material as a replacement for silicon. The point of the silicon is that it is a suitable material for the fabrication of transistors. The article talks as if the transistors were painted on and the wiring was in the silicon, rather than the other way around. While chips sometimes have a layer of polysilicon wiring for interconnecting slow signals, the bulk of the wiring is successive layers of metal separated by glass above the chip.

      Now maybe if they laid layers of this stuff on top of the wafer and built the wiring in it, or etched away the silicon around the active components and filled it with this stuff, it would be useful.

      And once the transistors are again discrete components fabricated by nanotech, perhaps something like this might make a suitable microscopic "circuit board". But the techniques to fab nanotransistors in bulk may also provide a way to construct a low-dilectric-constant matrix to contain them and their interconnecting wiring.
      • Yes, they confused resistance with dilectric value. The phenomenon described is the the slowing of propogation of signals in a wire surrounded by a material of high dilectric constant.

        "WITH many companies struggling to integrate low-k dielectrics, STMicroelectronics researchers claim to have succeeded in reducing the dielectric constant (k) of silicon dioxide, the traditional CMOS dielectric, using air holes. Low k values translate into higher signal propagation speeds. Using air as part of the dielectric is not a new idea, but the difficulty has been producing an interlayer dielectric with sufficient mechanical strength, reliability and uniformity.

        "The ST team integrated an SiO[subscript2] air-gap material into a dual-damascene copper process. The dielectric constant was measured at less than 1.7. The researchers say there are no issues with current leakage, electrical resistance or electromigration of the copper. The team is looking for implementation at sub-130nm. Fig.A (above left) is a cross-section of a three-level copper/air-gap architecture with a 640nm line spacing. Fig.B (above right) shows that the deposited oxide at the top of the image is planar to within 60nm above the voids."

        Air-gap dielectric [212.240.62.52]

        "Dielectric constant is not an easy property to measure or to specify, because it depends not only on the intrinsic properties of the material itself, but also on the test method, the test frequency and the conditioning of samples before and during the test. Dielectric constant tends to shift with temperature.

        What is Dielectric Constant [arlonmed.com]

  • Aw hell. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Havokmon ( 89874 ) <rick@NospAm.havokmon.com> on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:49AM (#3842848) Homepage Journal
    Now KFC [snopes2.com] will have to grow chickens WITH feathers..

  • Chicken feathers? This sounds funny and thats whut it just is, FUNNY. This is not ever going to be implemented (sp?) of my name isnt... uhh... give me a second...

  • What about PETA (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gazuga ( 128955 )

    Heh heh.

    Wouldn't it be ironic if this "conversion" happened and groups like PETA wanted to create flyers, newsletters, etc. to "stop the exploitation of chickens" -- but they couldn't because all of the computers were made from chickens?

    --Gaz
    • No. Basically this would spur on the "Animal Free" PC industry. However, the Animal Free PCs would be much hated and protested by environmental protection groups because of the harmful chemicals found within instead of biodegradable chicken feathers. Now the people that are both are going to be very confused.
  • "since the feathers apparently make the electrons fly."

    -Chickens don't even fly. This is bunk.
  • since the feathers apparently make the electrons fly. (Unlike turkeys.)

    I hate to disappoint you, but...Turkeys can fly. In the wild turkeys actually roost in trees.
  • Wow. /. was really asking for this.
    Dark Helmet: "What are you, Colonel Sanders, chicken?"

    Thank you for calling KFC, would you like your chicken fried or digitized?

    Tyson Thunderbird 1700 - The power of 1700 Chickens in your ATX Formfactor
    I'm sure there will be more to come...
    -1: Jokebait

  • ...if this technique could be used with any kind of bird plumage, it would mean that Google [google.com] is well-positioned to save a great deal of money on hardware...
  • And if you overclock.. You get :

    FRIED CHICKEN

    HA HA HA
  • Why not just use Britney Spears? I think she has a lot of silicon. Or was that silica?

  • What a relief! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I was just getting worried about this "The Earth will expire in 50 years" scare... So glad we've found a way to curtail the shortage of sand!
  • Have you ever smelled burnt chicken feathers? :p

  • This guy's living in a dream world (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cutie Pi ( 588366 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @11:57AM (#3842916)
    This article is very poorly written... lots of technical errors. As a professional in the semiconductor industry, I'm having trouble envisioning how this guy could actually replace silicon with chicken feathers.

    For one thing, they seem to talking about the dielectric constant of the materials. For chips, a low dielectric constant material between the metal lines is good, because it reduces the RC time delay. That's why you might have heard all the buzz about low-K dielectrics. But these are state-of-the art nanoporous materials that are designed for good deposition, thickness control, and etchability... I just can't see how you could do the same with chicken feathers.

    As for replacing the silicon itself? No way. Silicon is a unique material with semiconducting properties, meaning you can change its resistance by added small controlled amounts of dopant atoms. It can be made in large single crystal ingots with very low defect and impurity level. How in the world could you replace a single crystal with chicken feathers??? Hell, the fibers alone are 100's of times bigger than current gate widths.

    Me remains a bit skeptical.
    • with that kind of thinking your going to get fired!

      better hope your boss doesn't read slashdot.

    • Re:This guy's living in a dream world (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'd have to agree with you. After reading the article, I essentially said to myself, "Congradulations guy, you just measured the electron mobility of chicken feather compound." Any solid state device physics or materials engineer working in the semiconductor field can tell you that there are MANY (note the stress in many) more factors to designing chips that work. Hell, GaAs (gallium arsenice) has much better mobility than Silicon but isn't so widely used in any but the most high tech and high cost of circuits. Silicon has been tried and true because is has so many other desirable properties that simply make the the best material for the job. There are simply many more factors that go into this than simply measuring the electron mobility of chicken feathers.
      • After reading the article, I essentially said to myself, "Congradulations guy, you just measured the electron mobility of chicken feather compound."

        Agreed. Finding uses for waste materials is commendable, and if there are useful semiconductor applications for various composite materials then obviously renewable and natural composites should be considered (including plant and animal sources, such as chicken feathers).

        However, following the simplistic logic of the article one could conclude that we could make faster planes out of lead simply because bullets go so fast or make faster integrated circuits by fashioning them out of a single chunk of metal instead of using any semiconductors or insulators. Wow, I've just discovered that copper is a better conductor than silicon - I can make a fortune by building faster chips out of pure copper!!!

        As earlier posters have pointed out, I really hope that this was just a poorly researched and poorly written article that misinterpreted/misarticulated the actual science. I think someone at the Post just got in over their head when they saw "chicken" and "semiconductor" in the same sentence. Their next story in this series will be on how sand and "crystal power" replaced vacuum tubes.
    • I don't think you read the article clocely enough. The inventor's main goal seems to be saving the petrochemicals that would go into producing the alternative source material, sand.
  • But if we could make boards out of the stuff that feathers are made out of, wouldn't it be easy to just "grow" the feather material the way we want it to come out?

    If this has any basis in truth, then this sounds like a worthwhile little experiment to me.

    -Montag
  • Google has already demonstrated that pigeons are far more effective than chickens.

  • As the University of Delaware investigates chicken-wing chips, a hobbyist in Alberta, Canada is converting old barbeque components into a computer. He is applying for a whimsical patent for his "barbeque chips."

    Meanwhile, unsubstantiated rumours abound that in Britain, researchers are using scales from north atlantic cod in a new technology they are calling "fish'n chips."

    Okay, no more silly jokes.

    • rumours abound that in Britain, researchers are using scales from north atlantic cod in a new technology they are calling "fish'n chips."

      Actually, fish scales generally are left at sea when the fish are caught, scaled, gutted, (sometimes filleted) and flash frozen to be stored in the hold until the ship gets to port.

      On the other hand, crab shells are made of chitin, a protein with similar properties to the keratin that makes up feathers, hair and nails. Crab shells stay on the animals until after cooking and are stripped off during the 'picking' process. There is already a market for crab shells as they are composted into fertilizer which would mean diverting them to another industrial process would be pretty straight forward.

      Personally when I read the headline I was expecting to read a story about a product that competes with pork rinds, and not one that competes with Pentiums . And as for barbecue chips, Nitrogen based plastics [compusmart.ab.ca] have a nasty tendency to explode under extreme conditions, I hope they test for that before they let the overclockers (overcluckers?) get ahold of them.

  • This sucks.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by iONiUM ( 530420 )
    I bet the price of chicken mcnuggets will go up because of this.
    • Probably, but imagine chicken McNuggets that could compute Pi!
      • Instead of the stupid toy in the Happy Meal that ends up being picked up at a later date from the gum encrusted floor under the seats in the family minivan, each nugget in the meal is actually a demo of a newly released GBA game. You just stick the nugget into your Game Boy. When you're bored with it, eat it.
  • The idea of using natural and waste materials in other ways is not new. Henry Ford grew soybeans around his Dearborn, Mich., headquarters, Wool notes, to find a variety he could use to fabricate auto parts.

    Now if only we could find some use for all those AOL disks.
  • Is that they will run a Chicken Shit Operating System [microsoft.com].
  • An overclocked Rhode island red for that massively paralleled computing power!

  • Is this guy for real? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Target Drone ( 546651 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @12:01PM (#3842956)
    Maybe someone with an engineering degree could answer a couple of my questions.

    Wool's team took chicken feathers and plant oils and molded them into a composite material that approximates the shape and feel of silicon.

    Wouldn't "approximates the electrical characteristics of silicon" be better then just making a silicon substitute that looks and feels like silicon?

    When the researchers tested it for speed, they found that the composite allowed movement at about twice the rate of silicon. Though that's still slower than the speed in air, Wool said, "I was jumping up and down."

    It doesn't sound like they actually created a gate. Isn't creating something that conducts electricty a far cry from creating something that can actually be used as a gate in a circuit?

    And finally. Why does it sound like this guy is wasting the tax payers money?

  • Man, can you imagine a beowolf flock of these?
  • Okay.... let's go over this clearly.

    Source for info on what Air and Silicon is: MIT [mit.edu]

    Air is an insulator with incredibly high resistivity
    Pure Silicon is a semiconductor with reasonable resistivity

    Now if we introduce air bubbles into Pure silicon or chicken feathers. We introduce resistivity. Which is the number one thing, we _don't_ want in an electrical circuit (especially a small one) because resistance = heat = melting wires.

    Sure, electromagnetic _waves_ travel faster through air, but electrons don't travel at all through the air, that's why we aren't being electricuted on a daily basis.

    I really think the writer of this article needs to hire a science advisor so he understands basic current electrics.
  • Horse Feathers! They run faster.

    Hmm... Bird feathers evolved from scales. So wouldn't the scale-ability factor be better for use in your Beowulf Cluster? Would you rename BC to a Family Bucket?
  • Heh, just as they're working on featherless chickens [bbc.co.uk]...maybe it's all a big conspiracy.
  • wait 'til PETA gets ahold of this one
  • Which came first, the feather or the silicon?
  • So, in the futur, we could see the Googles pigeon ranking system [google.com]
    running on chicken feather CPU, using RFC 1149 [faqs.org] in conjunction with the BIRD Internet Routing Daemon [network.cz] for communications...

    Now, this could help all those rednecks to enter the new millenium!
    Anyway, they are already on the move, learning from all the successfull IT companies out there... [google.ca]
  • 'Silicon, once thought be simply the main material in the construction of microchips, has been discovered to be one of the 11 secret spices in Kentucky Fried Chicken.'

    'KFC recent press release states that "Every piece of delicious KFC, has essential minerals."'

    oh please may the cluck cluck jokes never end....
  • "Air, for instance, allows the fastest movement of all, because it provides essentially no resistance."

    I'll fill shoe boxes with superconducting air and sell a bunch of supercomputing VAPORWARE!

  • The 8 billion chickens killed each year in the USA alone present major environmental problems [upc-online.org]. While animal by-products can already be found in many unexpected places (film, rubber, etc), I find it odd that a scientist who has such a focus on finding environmentally sound solutions is looking at the poultry industry as a source of raw materials...
  • Darn editors! /. is at it again. You guys accidentally put the hardware icon in the story instead of the foot...
  • Are we running out of sand?!??!
  • ...and I saw a beowulf cluster of chickens.

    Alright, I deserve to get modded down for that.
  • computer 1 to computer 2: Chicken! computer 2 to computer 1: Turkey!
  • Terrible article, no mention of whether or not the chicken feather composite is even a semiconductor! Just nebulus and confusing statements about the speed of electrons in his stuff.
  • And once they process the feathers down to a point where they'll be able to get decent transistor densities, what will happen? The air will all be processed out.

    I suspect that there will be none of the mythical speed-enhancing air other than what's being blown up our collective butts.

    Sounds like someone is hoping to get some research grants to me.

  • Hopefully just dumbed down too far. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @12:19PM (#3843101)
    The reason silicon is used for integrated circuit chips is because it's a semiconductor - a material that can conduct or insulate depending on the electrical conditions around it. Chicken feathers do not semiconduct.

    As for electric signals travelling best through air... would you rather be standing ten feet from a power line, or reaching out with a metal fishing rod to touch it?

    As far as I can tell, the discussion seems to be a garbled description of using organic fibers/composites as a dielectric (insulating) material instead of oxides or nitrides. Much research has been done over the past several years looking for "low-K dielectrics". The "K" parameter is a measure of how an insulator interacts with an electric field imposed on it. A high-K material has more capacitance when you put a voltage across it; low-k materials for bulk insulators reduce the capacitance between wires (and between wires and the substrate). This reduces wire delays.

    An attractive area of research has been to put voids (bubbles or pores) into the dielectric material. Because gases tend to have low dielectric constants, introducing gas-filled voids in the dielectric will reduce the capacitance that two wires insulated by the dielectric will feel. This is what the "microbubbles" comment in the article refers to.

    I guess this guy wants to grind up chicken feathers and paste them on to a wafer instead of growing an oxide. Among other things, he'll need to remove all particles larger than a few tens of nanometres for this to not introduce defects in the chip. Good luck.

  • Intel picked up the technology... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Monday July 08, 2002 @12:21PM (#3843113)
    They said that the new 'Camilla' processor will be out in q4 of 2002.
  • What a load of blox
    " These signals travel faster in the presence of some materials than others. Air, for instance, allows the fastest movement of all, because it provides essentially no resistance. When traveling near solids, however, the movement tends to kick up opposing positive charges. These charges can distract the signal from completing its appointed rounds.

    Though these signals move more slowly in the presence of silicon than they do in air, silicon offers less resistance than many other materials do. That's why it has been used in microchips for so long. But engineers are always looking for ways to turbocharge their chips. Historically, they have been able to do this by inscribing more transistors into ever-tinier spaces. But some worry that a physical limit may be approaching. "

    SFAIK, this is shit. Silicon is good because it produces the second hightest number of compounds (carbon comes tops) and it's metalic, SFA to do with risistance. copper/gold and diamond have less resistance?

    Mr wool and his wooly ideas!
    Next he'll inject sheep so that they shead there flease.
  • Because of the organic nature of feathers, and the need to tightly control variances in chips, I highly doubt that this will ever happen. However, it does sound like it could point manufacturers in the right direction. If the feather composite was 2x as fast as silicon, it sounds like they could mimic the properties of feathers into an easily produced substance. (the article mentions microbubbles in silicon as one alternative)

    But the guy gets major props for coming up with this. It sounds like he has several good ideas that are similar for other industries.

    Hmm, I wonder if vegans would use computers with chips made out of chicken feathers...

  • "In the end, the only thing private industry is interested in is making money, so the question is whether systems he's developing will be cost-competitive with the systems they're replacing," said the Energy Department's Paster.

    Unfortunately, simply using the simplest or cheapest or least-polluting material doesn't add up to making the greatest amount of money. Control does. That's why cheap hemp was replaced by petrochemicals, why trolley systems died in favor of cars, and why Microsoft hates any standard not under their control.
  • A versitile little bird. Mean and stinky though.

    You know they're heating UGA [onlineathens.com] with chicken bi-products too.

    The science of agricultural waste may be an open target for easy jokes, but give these guys credit for finding alternative uses for a major and often overlooked pollutant.
  • Imagine a Beowulf Cluster [cuny.edu] of these!
  • I ain't no exbert here, but I reckon this article be a few coyotes short of a full pack. Ain't there somethin more to this silicone than how fast dem darn electrodes move a through it? Sure light is important, but don't a man want some substance to his bobblin? Shakin a bag a feathers don't do me no good, no matter how fast I can shake em.
  • My PC is finger-licking good!
  • ... to apply the feathers to the recyclers.

    This sort of write-up makes the whole recycling movement look silly. Respectable algorithms wear silicon suits.
    ___
  • I just put all this work into growing my featherless chickens [bbc.co.uk] and damnit now it turns out that features are worth something!
  • Of course with this new technology will come the standard moral debate over animal rights. Dell and Compaq will embrace it, offering their animal-byproduct computers, while Gateway will cater to the hippie-techies by offering guaranteed vegan computers made with real silicon. Vegan musicians like Moby will use Microsoft's new rights-management facilities to allow only vegan computers to play their music. And Intel will make headlines with it's buyout of Purdue foods.

  • There are times I seriously wonder if the /. editors are even paying attention...

    Then The Washington Post reminds me: Sometimes even professionial editors let humdingers through.

  • These Chicken-Feather chips are just a fad.
  • Chicken Plucking Unit?

    Ironically, the guy who came up with this is named "Wool"...

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