Concepts gleaned from the study of evolution could help overcome manufacturing problems in future computer chips. That’s the hope, at least, of researchers in the Intelligent Systems Group at the University of York, in England, who will present their findings next week at the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, in Trondheim, Norway.
As key components of transistors shrink from 45 to 22 nanometers, tiny natural variations in manufacturing—which make no difference in larger devices—start to affect performance. For instance, there’s no way to control the exact arrangement of atoms of doping elements within a lattice of silicon, and different levels of dopant will alter electrical effects. At these tiny sizes, line edges and surfaces that define components also have a natural roughness that can’t be avoided and can trip up a transistor’s function.
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