People talk about the death of semiconductors being able to shrink. IBM is laughing in your face - there’s plenty of room, and plenty of density, and they’ve developed a proof of concept to showcase where the technology can go. Here’s a look at IBM’s new 2nm silicon.
I’m all for chip features to be measured in picometers, but the path to 5nm has been fraught with setbacks and severe teething problems with EUV litho processes.
If I understand correctly the breakthrough enabling this is EUV light source and optics (mirrors instead of lenses) and it’ll be a while before the wavelength of the light source is a problem again.
Repost of the video probably. I think it was in the edutainment thread from a while back. Crazy how much technology depends on such few individuals and such few organizations.
I hope that means the CPU speed starts going up again. Not everything can be multi-threaded.
When I was in College (yes, Mammoths roamed these parts), we thought that (2.44 * wavelength / D) was the physically limiting factor which would put the brakes on Moore’s Law. It still is, but these folks have pushed at the parameters in every direction, and I speculate they have finally crossed over to an X-ray process, which throws the doors wide open again. 2 nm, spectacular!
I saw IBM stacking Nickle atoms 2 decades ago, to form the letters “IBM” and thought, “these guys are going to build circuits with this tech”.
For different devices there are different technology roadblocks, in this case CMOS/Silicon type devices, optics and imaging has always been the major hurdle, for other MEMS type devices the optics are not an issue at all and maybe would be thickness or quality of a thin film, or in RF or power transistors like GaN for 5G something else.
And now this…
Hmmm…possible new He reserves.
Trade He for rare earths?
Perfect hydrogen fusion reactions, get He as a waste byproduct.
Are we there yet?
And then there is this…
We got a taste of it with The Great Texas Blackout of 2021.
Taiwan is also dealing with drought and the threat of invasion by the PRC. There is recent talk about drought and power shortages in Arizona this summer. The tight microchip supply does not look to be getting better anytime soon.
The story about potential power blackouts this summer…
So let’s see here -
Temps go up and AC gets cranked up.
More EVs plugged in.
Pwr grid not up dated.
What could possibly go wrong?
Meanwhile out East there’s gas lines and panic.
Some White House clown states this would not be a problem if those people drove EVs.
Guess they don’t know where the electricity comes from.
How’s that Green New Deal bs work’n out for ya?
Of the two, AC getting cranked up is consuming appreciably more watts during peak demand. As opposed to EVs generally recharged overnight.
No to belabor the obvious, but they would have been spared gas lines and lack of fuel.
It doesn’t come from from the gasoline and jet fuel that Colonial was transporting via their pipeline.
At a real loss what a pipeline transporting gasoline and jet fuel getting shut down has to do with the ‘Green New Deal’, which last I checked was a policy paper and a couple bills going nowhere in Congress.
However…
We’re definitely going to need to generate and distribute more electricity as we start to displace gas heating with heat pumps.