Author: David Blackman
Date: 21:35:54 12/02/99
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On December 02, 1999 at 04:54:52, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >I'm not an expert, but I think metals on chips are already almost ideal. The way >to make a chip faster would be to use substrates that allow channels to form >faster. Superconductors wouldn't help with this. > >Notice that IBM is using a copper interconnect process for G4s. Copper is almost >twice as conductive as aluminum, but they're not getting very high clock speeds. > >Better conductors have lower resistance, which does mean less heat... > >-Tom These days on most CPUs the "wires" take up more chip space, more power, produce more wast heat, and cause more of the delay time, than the transistors. Superconductors would be a huge breakthrough if they could figure out how to make them as cheap, reliable, and convenient as the metal layers used now. But as far as i know no-one is close to doing that, and there are probably not even any major development efforts trying any more.
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