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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pravin Kamdar who wrote (18117)	11/7/2000 10:49:09 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 275872

Pravin, I can also see some problems from diffusion at tiny feature sizes that will limit the operating temperature, so the lower heat and copper is needed just to keep a rein on heat enhanced migration of assorted implanted ions to the point at which they degrade performance. We may end up with parts that have a 2 year full speed lifetime(~17,000 hours) and we will be told this....you will have to replace this in "X" hours. Just like many parts that are now life limited. We tend to feel that solid state is forever.....not true, at these speeds, heats and small feature sizes limitations do occur. So we make the tradeoff, get a new CPU after 17,000 hours or whatever your history is. There are well known and reliable graphical methods to determine the life of a semiconductor part by oven tests at higher temperatures that permit fairly accurate prediction of the life of a part at a lower temperature without taking 17,000 hours to make a 2 year life test. This will drive a need for the AMD speed reduction tech even for desktops as they can probably extend their lifetime dramatically if these time limitations do occur. More people will turn off their machines at night too. It will also hurt those schemes to sell distributed computing when your machine is idel....if it will speed the death of your CPU after so many hours, people will not permit it. It will also drive hyperactive heat dissipation methods, like freon or other cooled chip surround refrigeration methods. There are now small coolers that use reverse heat engines to cool gas for small applications like this that are more efficient than Peltier devices(very inefficient) and a lot smaller than the large motor driven coolers we have seen on some early AMD overclocked parts. Bill