IBM Developing Self-Configuring Chips

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    Confirmed User
    • Aug 2001
    • 2283

    #1

    IBM Developing Self-Configuring Chips

    Some interesting tech news for your Wednesday evening...


    IBM Developing Self-Configuring Chips
    http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...i_te/ibm_chips



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    Here's how it would work. Continually running electrical current through a tiny circuit can cause its materials to erode, as individual atoms get stripped and dragged away by the electricity. Eventually the metal breaks.

    Chip designers got around the problem by carefully choosing a blend of metals. Now, Meyerson said, IBM has developed a way to make the metal erosion happen at will ? when software running the chip determines that part of the circuitry needs cutting or tuning.

    "It's a bit frightening to the typical designer," Meyerson said.

    He said early versions of the self-changing chips have been tested at IBM, which, like other computing companies, is pursuing means of making systems "autonomic," or self-healing and self-regulating. Meyerson said fully realized versions of the morphing chips would emerge in the next decade.
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