Engineers and smarties only > LOL :-/
Palo Alto (CA) - Hewlett-Packard (HP) today released first details about a "hybrid" nano-CMOS chips that could lead the way not only to much smaller chip structures and extend the physical limits of Moore's law, but also continue the trend to a substantial decrease of power consumption in semiconductors.
The company said that its research results could lead to a new type of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that are up to eight times denser that today's devices. The foundation of the technology is a crossbar switch structure, called "field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)," that is placed on top of conventional CMOS (complementary metal oxide silicon).
"As conventional chip electronics continue to shrink, Moore's Law is on a collision course with the laws of physics," said Stan Williams, an HP senior fellow at the Quantum Science Research division of HP Labs. "Excessive heating and defective device operation arise at the nanoscale. What we've been able to do is combine conventional CMOS technology with nanoscale switching devices in a hybrid circuit to increase effective transistor density, reduce power dissipation, and dramatically improve tolerance to defective devices."
