Moore's Law, Computer chips & Silicon

[RyanJ]

Hi all!

 

Does anyone have any idea of the type of substances would be used to replace silicon as processors get smaller? Would organic compounds meet some of these needs and would the use of superconductors aid in the creator of suck small processors?

 

I'm mainly interested in the chemistry relationships suck as what would be required for something to replace Silicon as the primary component in chips in the future

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[woelen]

As a computer scientist I expect that massive parallellism in the future will bring more processing power. Imagine processing units consisting of organic molecules. Slow, but versatile, and imagine that there are billions of these things working in parallel, carefully networked for inter-process communication. This is what happens in our brains. They are slow, but hugely parallel. Together, these slow cells form the most powerful processing unit known to man.

 

So, I think that in the (still quite far) future organo-computer will be powerful. Currently, experiments are conducted with "plastic-based" chips.

 

New semiconductor technologies, based on GaAs can be used for ultrafast systems. GaAs based semiconductors can be made much faster, but their manufacture also is much more expensive, but in the future these may become more common. In certain ultra-high frequency applications, GaAs semiconductor devices are used (e.g. multi gigahertz transmitters, ultra high speed DSP's).

 

Yet another important development are optical processing units. With these, light itself is used for processing purposes. Nowadays, optical networks are quite common already, but processing (e.g. routing) still is done by converting optics-->electronics-->routing-->electronics-->optics, but experimental setups exist already, which can do routing directly by means of optical devices, without electronics intermediate.

 

As with many technologies, do not expect a single technology to be the silver bullet. A combination of technologies will give best results and in practice I expect that different technologies will live next to each other, together giving the results we want.

[RyanJ]

So' date=' I think that in the (still quite far) future organo-computer will be powerful. Currently, experiments are conducted with "plastic-based" chips.

[/quote']

 

I find the idea of plastic chips very interesting but arn't plastics insulators?

 

Organic processing systems also sounds interesting as does optical sytems....

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[woelen]

Certain plastics (I'm no expert in this, though) can be made semiconducting. They even have made plastics, which, while conducting current, emit light. These allow one to make large glowing surfaces, something like LED's, but at a much larger surface.

 

Some interesting links on LEP's (Light Emitting Plastics):

http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/Science/html/plastics.html

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/light.htm

 

A nice link on plastic electronic devices and semiconductors:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030830/fob5.asp

[RyanJ]

Thanks for the links woelen, I will undertake more research tomorrow!

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

[bascule]

Most of the buzz has been around replacing silicon with diamond:

 

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Aug/gee20030827021485.htm

 

There was recently a thread on this:

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=17457

[Tetrahedrite]

Certain plastics (I'm no expert in this' date=' though) can be made semiconducting. They even have made plastics, which, while conducting current, emit light. These allow one to make large glowing surfaces, something like LED's, but at a much larger surface.

[/quote']

And indeed they can make polymers which are fully conductive, relying on a high degree of conjugation for electron transfer. I believe the guys who discovered it (by accident) won a nobel prize.

[BhavinB]

There are no polymers with inherent metallic conductivity. There are however several conjugated polymer/nanoparticle composites which come close. Really close. Just one or two orders of magnitude off (for reference, a semiconductor is 5 orders of magnitude lower than metals).

 

Gonna be an interesting decade I think. But because the materials and processes are progressing much slower than Moore's Law, there will come a point where the density of transistors won't get any larger for some time. Instead, new computation concepts will increase computing power. We are already seeing it in todays newer processers: 64 bit computing, dual cores, increased pipelines, asynchronous logic etc.

[ecoli]

I was under the impression that some reasearch was going into small chains of carbon atoms... can't remember if this is true or not.