10/17/2011

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In this Lecture:

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Microprocessor Fabrication

Lecture 02

Trends and Prospects

Fundamentals of Microcomputers
(Contd)

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Daniel D. DECE

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FabricationDesign

Fabrication
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 A microprocessor is nothing, but a large digital integrated circuit

on a semiconductor wafer.
 Millions of transistors are integrated on the wafer to construct
functional circuits. Today a transistor as small as 32nm is being
processed by using special CMOS process
 The CMOS technology has made it possible to integrate several
useful HWs with the microprocessor core such as: MMU, PMU,
Cache, GPU,

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10/17/2011

From Sand to Silicon Chips

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The Process Slides

Manufacturing - Video
(MEMC in Texas)

Technology Trends and prospects

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Trends - Hardware

Trends - Architecture
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Moores law has expired

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Parallelism and redundancy

The number of transistors on a chip cannot be doubled every

two years

Build as many as possible similar units and Keep the system as

busy as possible

Computing in hardware

Switching frequency has hit the limit

Dedicate a HW unit for a certain frequent function

For a Silicon based system, it doesnt seem possible to clock

faster anymore

Layered Architecture

A quest for new materials

- New material research is one of the hot issues around the globe
- Carbon as a new playground
- Molecular computing and Cellular automata

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- Keep system functions in a hierarchy

- Precedence dependency and order
- Stochastic execution paradime

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Trends - Computing
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Heterogeneous Computing
Mixed platforms mixed algorithm  mixed solution

Learning and adaptation

- From hard-computing to intelligent computing
(mimicking biological systems)
- Programs that write programs

High performance Computing (HPC)

- Real-life simulations and analysis
- Cloud Computing
- Computing without computers - the end of the PC

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