Technological Revolution in Chip Industry

Technological Revolution in Chip Industry

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The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has unveiled the first set of research teams selected to explore unproven but potentially powerful approaches that could revolutionize US chip development and manufacturing. This is part of the $1.5 billion, five-year program known as the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) to support work on advances in chip technology.

In addition to technological considerations, there are also worries about the rising cost of designing integrated circuits, and about increased foreign, namely Chinese, investment in semiconductor design and manufacturing.

The ERI’s budget represents around a fourfold increase in DARPA’s typical annual spending on hardware.

One project aims to radically reduce the time it takes to create a new chip design, from years or months to just a day, by automating the process with machine learning and other tools so that even relatively inexperienced users can create high-quality designs. The agency hopes that the automated design tools will inspire smaller companies without the resources of giant chip makers.

Radically new materials and new ways of integrating computing power and memory will be needed in the near future. Shifting data between memory components that store it and processors that act on it sucks up energy and creates one of the biggest hurdles to boosting processing power, according to technologyreview.com.

Another ERI project will explore ways in which novel circuit integration schemes can eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the need to shift data around. The ultimate goal is to effectively embed computing power in memory, which could lead to dramatic increases in performance.

On the chip architecture front, DARPA wants to create hardware and software that can be reconfigured in real time to handle more general tasks or specialized ones such as specific artificial-intelligence applications. Today, multiple chips are needed, driving up complexity and cost.

Some of DARPA’s efforts overlap with areas already being worked on extensively in industry. An example is a project to develop 3-D system-on-chip technology, which aims to extend Moore’s Law by using new materials such as carbon nanotubes, and smarter ways of stacking and partitioning electronic circuits.