MIT Focuses on Chip Optimization

eldavojohn writes "MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories is focusing on the manufacturing of chips as the variables that affect chip quality become more and more influential. From one of the researchers, "The extremely high speeds of these circuits make them very sensitive to both device and interconnect parameters. The circuit may still work, but with the nanometer-scale deviations in geometry, capacitance or other material properties of the interconnect, these carefully tuned circuits don't operate together at the speed they're supposed to achieve.""

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Plammox]

It's more likely they'll contribute to increasing the yield from each manufactured wafer, making the maybe not so crazy fast desktop processors cheaper. Also, the material and chemical usage will decrease per "good" cpu die, so there's an environmental angle here, which isn't bad either, I suppose.

Re:In Soviet Russia

[Plammox]

Just RTFA. It's about RFID chip optimization. But at the 65nm node it's relevant for general CMOS designs as well, including CPU die.

Re:Just to clarify

[Paradigm_Complex]

Ultimately this will have a limited impact on your desktop's Giggerhurts, somewhere way down the line, but it's nothing you'll notice and, for most of us, nothing we'll really understand. Unless the mathematical basis of chip-fab optimisation is your field, this isn't going to mean much.

There's plenty on /. that won't affect me personally (nor the vast majority of slashdotters). This doesn't lessen our interest in the matter. Perhaps plenty of slashdotters don't understand this now, but having been exposed to this the subject matter may garner some of our interests. Don't underestimate the value (or interest in) information, irrelevant of how useless it may seem.