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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 29, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 39
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Breaking News -
Platforms:
Sun Presents Chip-Design
Breakthrough
Sun Microsystems Inc researchers will reported that they have devised a way
to
dramatically increase the speed at which semiconductors can talk to each
other.
By placing the chips edge to edge, directly touching, so data can flow
freely,
Sun has taken out the need for the tiny wires, pads and solder points that now
connect chips on printed circuit boards that help make up computer systems,
Sun said.
The breakthrough could mean sending data among chips up to 100 times faster
than current top transmission rates on traditional semiconductor-chip
interconnects, Sun said.
It would also solve one of the oldest challenges in the chip industry: the
bottlenecks that crop up when chips -- which are getting ever faster -- are
connected to one another.
"It's faster, cheaper, and uses less power," said John Gustafson, principal
investigator for Sun's high productivity computing systems.
Hit hard by downturn Sun already holds seven patents on the new design and
will seek to capitalize on them commercially, a Sun spokesman said.
The New York Times on Monday first reported on the apparent
breakthrough.
Even though Sun has been harder hit than rivals IBM, Dell and HP in the
technology downturn, it continues to invest aggressively in research and
development.
Sun researchers Ivan Sutherland, Robert Drost and Robert Hopkins will
present
their findings in a paper entitled "Proximity Communication" at the Custom
Integrated Circuits Conference on Tuesday in San Jose, Calif.
Gustafson said that, as far as he knew, most of semiconductor industry has
hit
a wall in terms of pushing the current, standard, solder and wire
interconnects, as far as they could.
Designed for power In the researchers' paper, they write that "on-chip"
performance has been increasing far more rapidly than "off-chip" communication
because the number of transistors on each chip and their speed have
outstripped how quickly data can be moved among chips.
"This is a chip-to-chip technology," Gustafson said. "It could be memory,
it
could be processing. This is a way of building communication between
them."
Sutherland and the researchers wrote that the difference between on-chip
performance and off-chip communication is because the tiny wires that connect
to chips and tie them together are "about two orders of magnitude larger" than
the wiring that's on the chip itself.
By connecting chips using Sun's design -- such as lining them up as if on a
checkerboard -- vastly more powerful, cheaper computer systems could be
designed that consume less power, Sun said.
"We really have to do all this work now to see what we can do with it down
the
line," Gustafson said.
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