Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 06:01:46 12/04/99
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I don't see that superconductors would decrease the amount of metal necessary... And even if signal transmission in the wires takes more time than FET switching (it does??), the relative mu and epsilon of aluminum is almost ideal, so superconductors won't transmit THAT much faster... If higher conductivity is so great for modern-process ICs, then everybody would have switched to copper a long, long time ago. I'm not arguing that superconductors are bad. I'm just saying that as far as I know, they wouldn't help modern processes. (They may be great for future processes though...) -Tom On December 03, 1999 at 00:35:54, David Blackman wrote: >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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