> Microelectronics manufacturing has been driven for the past 60 years by Moore’s law, which states that the density of transistors on a chip should double every two years. The electronics industry has adopted this principle as a production goal to increase the power and efficiency of computer processors. It has proven successful and steady for decades, but there are signs that the trend is starting to stall.
"Signs it's starting to stall"? Moore's 'law' has been dead for a decade at minimum at the literal interpretation, and for over two decades if observable performance is what you actually cared to measure. What does this even have to do with the research the article is about? It's not clear to me why the author felt the need to shoehorn this into the headline.
Heat is exactly why this is useful. A very large amount of power draw is due to the physical size of circuits. This monolithic 3D stacking should result in smaller wires for decreased parasitic capacitance. SRAM is probably the biggest winner in some respects. The paper suggests they can make SRAM smaller, and given most of a modern CPU die is SRAM I would be shocked if that wasn’t a huge thermal win alone, either by adding more cache or by reducing the size of the core or both.
I’d be interested to see if you couldn’t throw diamonds at the heat problem though. There was some recent work done suggesting diamond could help a lot with heat, but I’m unsure if it would work here.
The solution is simple. In our universe we have to dump heat through at least one dimension. That is inefficient and leaves only 2 remaining dimensions for the chip, hence all our chips are 2d rectangles. Simply add one dimension so that you can either build 3d chip and dump heat in 4th dimension, or keep chip 2d but dump heat throughout 2 extra dimensions much more efficiently.
Also look into Mythic AI, and also the recent (ultimately tragic) story of the wurtzite ferroelectric device breakthrough at the University of Michigan.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 27.6 ms ] thread"Signs it's starting to stall"? Moore's 'law' has been dead for a decade at minimum at the literal interpretation, and for over two decades if observable performance is what you actually cared to measure. What does this even have to do with the research the article is about? It's not clear to me why the author felt the need to shoehorn this into the headline.
Heat radiation elements must be designed as part of the structure?
Sophie Wilson has famously said how easy it is for active silicon to get hotter than a nuclear reactor.
I’d be interested to see if you couldn’t throw diamonds at the heat problem though. There was some recent work done suggesting diamond could help a lot with heat, but I’m unsure if it would work here.