MIT & DARPA Creating SuperFast Chips
Computer Chips Go 3D The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA, MIT and Minnesota based SkyWater Technology are teaming up to push computing speed forward. They're developing a computer chip that has circuitry on more than 1 plane. It's a "3D-System on a Chip" to accelerate speed on chips the size of a fingernail. Pushing the Limits The chip industry is pushing the space limit. Right now, transistors on chips are 7 nanometers apart. Between 2020 and 2024 to increase speed they're expected to be 5 nanometers apart. Experts forecast that's the space limit to maintain the integrity of the chips. Layering Building circuits on multiple planes is a solution. The MIT-DARPA-SkyWater team is designing layer on layer of circuits, both logic and memory, to be stacked up to the 3rd dimension...creating chips with increasing speed. By 2020, the team hopes to demonstrate their manufacturing process. By 2021, they expect to have it ready fo