超越摩尔定律 | Beyond Moore’s Law

Pursuit of high performance computation is endless desire of human being. This desire has given birth to Silicon Valley previously mentioned, modern society and this article. Moors’ Law serves so well in scaling down of transistor and Dennard’s Scaling Theory as more technical guide until very recent. It is very interesting to look into how the skyscraper of computation built up from single transistor to integrated circuit to hardware system such as personal computer, big server, even supercomputer. It is a bottom-up process in which lower level gives solid support to higher level. As maturity of semiconductor industries, society focus shift upwards to levels where holds more innovation and chaos, namely, software and cloud computing. But semiconductor is still a trunk which feeds a whole bunch of branches. How to keep it evergreen? Here are the plans intrigued by Brian’s presentation.

Plan A: Transistor Scaling

Scaling is predicted down to 8 nm. Currently Intel reaches to 22 nm by introduction of tri-gate structure. 3D integration is kind of another way to scale. Stacking of heterogenous IC could give more functions and lower power consumptions per area.

IDF 2011

Plan B: Circuit and System Design

If the physical limit are approaching, here is the near term issue we can look into. Innovations are demanded to optimize IC performance, power and variability. Non-volatile memory and multi-core computation are promising.

Plan C: Exploratory Research

Exotic material such as nanotube, graphene and quantum dot, new device like spintronics, also quantum computation.

A magnetologic gate, which consists of graphene contacted by several magnetic electrodes.

Reference:

THE INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP FOR SEMICONDUCTORS: 2010 UPDATE

硅谷传奇 | Silicon Valley

硅谷神话一再被提起从未真正了解，一直被模仿^[1]但从未被超越。那里是科技圣地，引来多少朝拜者和取经人，那里是天堂，是不是人才都想往里挤。乔布斯的突然离去是一个时代的结束，这话被说滥了，但也不假，那在这之前又是什么样的时代呢，他又是在怎样的一个时代诞生的，这是一个深入了解硅谷历史的契机，那就先从扒开历史的外衣开始享受吧，抓住一个中心（技术），两个关键点（社区和金融制度），每个人都应该自己体验一下。

网上有很多相关资料，下面是我觉得比较好的，一定得点

Silicon Valley
硅谷发动机的历史
Secret History of Silicon Valley
A Chronological Timeline of Computer
The Myth Of Silicon Valley

还有相关书籍
History of Semiconductor_Engineering
Makers of the Microchip A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor
The Silicon Valley of Dreams

关于硅谷不得不知的人物

   Father of Silicon Valley

Frederick Terman – Stanford Industrial Park

  搞了个科技园区，鼓励学生创立了HP，吸引了Shockley和很多其   他公司，反过来促进了斯坦福大学和伯克利大学的发展。

   

   Father of Transistor
William Shockley, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory

充满个性的天才，在Bell实验室跟别人一起搞出了晶体管，获     得了诺贝尔奖，后来离开Bell来到硅谷创立了肖克利半导体实验   室，从东部招来了以下八位年轻科学家。

The Traitorous Eight (仙童八叛逆): Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts.

这是肖克利招来的八位年轻人，跟肖克利闹翻之后，他们离开了肖克利半导体实验室，创立了仙童半导体 (Fairchild Semiconductor)。后来仙童半导体里的员工跳槽创立了AMD，后来 Gordon Moore和 Robert Noyce创立了Intel.

乔布斯说：“仙童半导体公司就象个成熟了的蒲公英，你一吹它，这种创业精神的种子就随风四处飘扬了。” 然后乔布斯就来了。

Father of Apple

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

[1] Silicon Valleys Popping Up Here, There, Everywhere