Share with friends and circles of friends with wechat scanning QR code < / P > < p > < p > < July 31. US media recently reported that the most powerful chips are playing an increasingly important role, but they can hardly be called "microchips"

because all walks of life need faster and more powerful chips, the method of reducing transistors is entering the bottleneck. So engineers stacked microchips, and eventually led to the rapid rise of "giant chips". In some cases, they are reaching an almost unprecedented volume

at present, most chips are the same size as coins, but some chips are actually large enough to resemble credit cards. In extreme cases, it can even be the size of a dinner plate

these supercomputers appear not only in the most powerful supercomputer on earth, but also in daily necessities. For example, Microsoft Xbox and Sony playstation5 both use products designed by AMD. Apple's M1 ultra in MAC studio also adopts this design method

but these giant chips pose a challenge to engineers because they generate additional heat when calculating in densely packed circuits. Although they are usually greener, their huge size also means that they often need to consume more energy. For example, Intel's Ponte Vecchio chip is more environmentally friendly in each calculation, but it still needs to consume 600 watts of energy, which is enough to start and run the hair dryer. If you ask why giant chips have not been used in mobile phones, this is one of the limiting factors

to some extent, giant chips are just a way to promote the evolution of Moore's law. Intel founder Gordon Moore once said that every two years or so, the number of transistors on the chip will double. Giant chip is only the latest innovative product in the industry, which promises to provide higher efficiency

ASML in the Netherlands actually monopolizes the production of chip manufacturing equipment, which is very important for the production of the world's most advanced chips and the smallest transistors. But even so, the company also said that to maintain the operation of Moore's law, just making the transistors on the chip smaller is not enough. In the presentation to buyers in September 2021, ASML talked about the concept of "system extension". ASML spokesman confirmed that the company believes that the system expansion is a supplement to the work of narrowing the range of microchip options

to borrow the metaphor of cities, if a metropolis cannot reduce its housing size or make its transportation more environmentally friendly, it may have no other choice but to expand outward

packaging + core particles

however, manufacturing giant chips is not easy, in part because it means moving each chip component into place with nanoscale accuracy and connecting them without a miniature welding gun

this is largely due to an area that has been neglected by the chip industry for a long time, namely "packaging"

in traditional devices, chips that receive and send radio waves (such as calling through Wi Fi) can be connected to other different chips for general computing, and the connection between them is actually called "bus". But just like its status in the real world, this kind of "bus" is difficult to quickly transport things between adjacent "Silicon cities". As an alternative, the new package of giant chips can immediately connect the two chips. The result is like putting all these chips under one roof and constantly raising them

subramanian Iyer, a former director of IBM's packaging improvement department and now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that traditional microchips should occupy almost one-third of their space and consume a lot of energy to transmit the chip's calculation results to the rest of the circuit. Stacking chips makes communication between them faster, because it allows them to have many additional connections, just as taking an elevator between skyscrapers is much faster than shuttling through the whole building

the important link between giant chips and chips is a new microchip, called "core particle". It eliminates many old-fashioned circuits and supports instant messaging with different cores. By making many simple and direct connections, these cores can be fused with different chips to form giant chips. Rakesh Kumar, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, said that the direct communication between the different cores that make up giant chips enables them to operate like a single large microprocessor < p > the Ponte Vecchio graphics processor recently released by Intel is a typical example. Each Ponte Vecchio consists of 63 completely different core particles. These cores are stacked in the best position, and then squeezed together. There are three 100 square millimeters of complete space, which can accommodate 100billion transistors. In contrast, the daily chip on the laptop core is less than 150 square millimeters, with about 1.5 billion transistors

the use of stacked cores is clearly the development direction of Intel processors. Most of its servers, desktops and notebook processors that have been released but have not yet been listed have adopted this technology. Das Sharma, a senior researcher at Intel, said that this approach "provides a new method for chip manufacturing, which is faster and more cost-effective than traditional methods"

he pointed out that stacking pellets also allows Intel to expand the efficiency of its next-generation desktop and server chips without increasing its (two-dimensional) footprint or overall energy consumption. The energy used in chips is an important design factor, and energy conservation is one of the highest priorities of the industry. Stacking cores allows engineers to squeeze extra space from the current design by saving time and energy required for the communication of various components of the chip. But when efficiency comes first, pellets may also be used to make larger microchips, although they will consume more energy AMD is a pioneer in the field of chip technology. It has provided several cores in processors. The company found that it could significantly improve the running speed of its programs by simply stacking a storage chip in the main part of its CPU (the chip that performs most of the non graphic computing in the PC) Marc swinnen, the product advertising director of

giants joining

ansys, said that although the number of giant chips manufactured based on pellets may be small at present and may only be used in the most powerful programs, the mode of manufacturing them is accelerating. ANSYS is an organization that builds human simulation software programs, which are widely used in micro ?
2023-03-22 10:04:54