The insatiable demand for better chips is spurring the chip industry to adopt ever more complex designs. Chips are becoming ever more complex, if we are to believe the rules of the chip industry, which tell us that the number of logic gates on silicon wafers is doubling by a factor of 10 every five years. That means faster, smarter chips. But it also means the chip industry will quickly reach the milestone of 500,000 logic gates per chip this year (up from 50,000 five years ago). Engineers are looking for innovative ways to move forward in increasingly small and complex chip designs.

Clearly, the semiconductor industry’s next design inspiration is smaller, faster and smarter.

In recent years, the chip industry has been trying to combine discrete components with graphics, processing and communication capabilities onto a single chip. But the resulting complexity makes it harder to design these system chips. And the complexity is only increasing. Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s chief technology officer, described the chip of the future as a keynote speaker at the Intel Developer Forum this spring. “We are on track to make 30GHz chips at or below 10 nanometers by 2010,” he said.

As engineers try to shrink circuits and fit them onto tiny silicon wafers, they will run into the science of electronics and energy applications that could help improve the performance of chips.

Some engineers have turned to nature for inspiration to solve these intractable problems. Dave Biegelsen, a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Centre, says the power and density problems are getting worse, forcing people to break down substrate or silicon samples to make denser circuits that use less power. The real breakthrough came in moving into 3D and non-silicon organic devices. Scientists have created organic light-emitting diodes that are expected to be used in consumer electronics devices.

H201Ti

H201Ti

H201Ti

Researchers and engineers also realize that no matter what material the chips are made of, the new computing system will challenge the design approach that has guided the computer industry for the past 40 years. “We want to develop a thinking computing system that can monitor itself and repair itself,” Tony Tether, administrator of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in April. Such cognitively capable computers can reconfigure themselves as needed to produce their own code in response to naturally expressed human commands, and can be configured and maintained by non-specialists, thus lasting longer than current computer systems. We don’t expect to reach our end goal for many years, but we’re starting to work on the basic technology now.”

This is important work because the chip industry is in the midst of one of the most important retooling operations it has seen in decades. Of course, this is a routine job. The chip industry is replacing equipment every five or six years as chip designers seek new tools to build next-generation chips. The difference this time is that the precipitous drop in the chip market in 2001 was due to a sharp slowdown in the initial design of chips. According to Bernd Braune, president and chief executive of Get2Chip, a start-up that provides tools for designing system chips, there were only 4,000 such initial designs in 2002, about a third of the number in 2001. Now, chip designers are accelerating the recovery to previous levels, with a design climax expected in early 2003. The growth of new start-up designs is good news for the chip industry. These new designs are expected to lead to new products in the second half of 2004.

Silicon circuit systems will be used in various products. Increasingly, home appliances, consumer devices, public Spaces, transportation systems and businesses will use chips called embedded controllers to provide information and feedback to help our living environments. In fact, in 2000, the average person encountered 250 embedded controllers, or silicon chips, per day, according to Semico Research. By 2005, that number will increase to 304.

Elaborate processors designed to monitor and communicate information can mimic the complex systems that regulate and govern human activity. The purpose of this article is clearly to improve the tools and knowledge of current designers. In his talk, Gelsinger said, imagine a possible world in which every room and every device in the home uses chips. As you can imagine, the product is self-identifying, self-maintaining, and notifying different devices when they need to be upgraded or maintained.