How exactly is the size of the computer reduced ?

Is it based on nanotechnology ?

Is picotechnology being applied on computers ?

This post has been edited by JustForFun: Oct 10 2009, 09:34 AM

Firstly, you'll have to understand how computer processors work.

Processors comprises of many transistors. Technology is advancing to include as many transistors in the chip as possible, hence the nanotechnology.

You can easily google up information for the number of components being integrated to a single motherboard chip.

there`s this graph.. maxx what what graph.. IF i`m not mistaken.. correct me if i`m wrong..

this dude plot the graph and it is said that the processor and PC industry development will double its rate every 2 years.. meaning, now you got latest 5MHz then next 2 years you`ll have 10MHz

close, but not correct. the number of transistors on a similar sized chip is expected to double every 18 months or so, that may not necessary mean more mhz. in fact, mhz has fallen since the p4 3.4ghz days (not its 2.xghz)

and this rule is close to limit on current silicon tech. come new breakthrough is needed to continue.

another limiting factor is human. if any of you have a 9" netbook, you can see that the keyboard is more or less unusable. for human ergonomics i noticed that 12" seems to be the minimum. same issue with screen size. so unless you come up with new human machine interface method, the physical size of computer wont go down much.

although iphones and other smartphones may evolve to replace portable computers (provided you dont need to type much)

can i crap here? LOL its easy. Find a way

What's the main concern here (in the perspective of pc technology) is not to decrease the size of the pc, but rather to decrease the size of components.
This then enables them to 'stuff' as many things as possible for the same dimension of pc.

No you can't crap here. Please contribute something useful towards the discussion

sometimes the processor are getting smaller adn smaller.... newscientist megazine once report that scientist are using spin of electron as proccsor

as small as a computer could be, most of us still need a fairly big screen

Hi, you are referring to Moore's Law. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore.

Foundemental of transistor based CPU is silicon (sand) as it exhibits conductance depends on thresholding of the gate, hence the name semi-conductor.

As mentioned by our friend forumer in post above, it has limitation.

When the gap between the collector and emitter is too short (to make it smaller), election tunneling occurs which is uncontrolable independent from the Gate. We certainly do not want a processor giving different values/results as it act randomly.

Second consideration is the cost. The closer the gap of the C and E, the production yield (the success rate on producing a good CPU) would be more challenging/difficult. Cost increase as a result.

The reason why PDA can be made such small in size as the CPU inside is generally of lower spec CPU as this device is not as power hungry as those engineering research workstation.

Off Topic a bit. Which company owns the most powerful and smallest CPU?

The answer is not a company, it is the Pentagon (Military Research Center). All the "consumer" grade CPU are a few generation behind what is being research and used in military.

The internet and advanced telecomunication system were the branch out of militory project. Of couse a few generation behind....

I hope am not stating the obvious

As in the electron's spin number!!?? Wow....
Such advance is the technology now... Beyond my comprehension XD
Awesome!!

You're saying transistors in the chips are IGBT? Because if the terminals are C and E, the control should be Base (for the case of BJT).
But I believe it should be IGBT, as BJT is no longer used.

Cost increases is inevitable when it comes to developing new technology. But as research for more advance technology takes place, the cost increase is absorbed by the newer technology. Hence the chase of technology never ends, where what's considered to be 'hi-tech' today will be considered as thing of the past in as short as few months.

It's no surprise (to me at least) that the corporation owning the most advance technology is none other than US Ministry of Defense.
As a comparison, while we're using flash drives up to capability of 32Gb now, it's been used in the Pentagon for few years back.

take a look at mac book air, they managed to stuff cpu, 2 gig of ram, built-in graphic chip, etc etc, on a board thats about the length of a pencil. most of the space in modern laptop is taken up by the battery. the weight by battery and disc drives.

and yet the mac book air is still 13" diagonal. thats due to human interface requirements. until you have other form of interactions that is practical and can be used easily (hud built in glasses, voice control, 3d motion sensor, etc) you cant go much lower than 12" diagonal.

so while components will of course get smaller and faster. laptop size is mroe or less a plateau now. desktop may shrink to shuttle/all-in-one size.

Lemme put my 2 cents in. The the EE business there are a few ways to make things smaller and in this case, computer devices smaller. Granted digital electronics and microtronics isn't my subfield, but i do know how things work. Although you can PM Ikanayam if you want to know more lol since his field is dedicated to microprocessors.

Either way, the first way to make things smaller is markedly to cram more shite into a smaller area, which means more processors into a singular microprocessor. You don't use IGBTs for switches, FETS with individual logic cells are used. Anyways, but making the production process smaller and multileveled, you're essentially cramming more transistors into the same area, thus you can make smaller chips.

The limits of this are dependent on the materials used, the gate construction, the routing of the microwires and so on. But generally you get the picture lah.

Secondly, to cram more shit into stuff, you need to integrate more discrete components into the system, or increase route density so that more options exist when it comes to component placement. The easiest way is to stuff more conductive layers into a PCB (circuit board), so that routing becomes easier and the physical layout can have it's density increased.

Thirdly, you always have the problem of heat, cramming so much into such small areas always gives you a problem with heat. By adopting either lower powered components or adopting better cooling, technically, the component density around "hot spots" can be increased, giving you a smaller package by default.

Last if not least, no, the military does no possess better than consumer electronics technology. They usually follow DOD MILSTD when it comes to stuff like temp curve stability, shock reliability and so on. Meaning that it's no more advanced than normal stuff we use, but instead of having a transistor in a single ceramic plastic case, military components come in metal canned LMC style casings. Resistors also come in fireproofed coating and the higher spec RNXX series. The Military emphasizes it's technology towards hardened reliability and the ability to operate in differing environments, often they will choose to use battle toughened last generation technology rather than latest generation stuff.

No, this is not what I meant. IGBT is for high voltage devices, FET is.

When look at transistor, C and E came to the my picture naturally.

Thanks for pointing this out.

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Added on October 12, 2009, 11:13 amThis post has been edited by nice.rider: Oct 12 2009, 11:13 AM

Incorrect, the difference of spectrum has little to do with the electronic requirements of a device. I can build a simple device with parts scattered around my house that can transmit into the same frequency net as SINCGARS and other systems. They don't require special engineering by a longshot. Even the advanced battle laptops used are just specially binned Core2Duos with a hardened packaging and no more than that. Alot of the Engineers Australia and IEEE members i meet work for DSTO in developing Military technologies, and hey, it ain't all superweapons lol.

Actually 3D rendering, developed by the likes of Phong and so on, were developed in civilian labs. The military could use these methods due to the availability of computational power.

The Military has never been in the real business of cutting edge, it's in the business of winning wars, that's why foot soldiers are still using M4s instead of stuff like F2000s, SCARs or Magpul Masadas. Reliability is a huge issue.

You've got my idea wrong. What I'm saying is, when I said technology advancements allows more things to be stuffed in, I meant it'd otherwise take up more space.

For example, one can see the significant difference of size between a 32Mb RAM and a 1Gb RAM. The dimension is roughly the same, but yet more stuffs i.e. transistors can be fitted in.

Hope you understand what I meant.

Yeah, exactly what I've wanted to portray.

Anyway, pardon me for stating IGBT is used. Forgotten the fact that IGBTs are more prominent in Power Electronics, instead of Microelectronics.

That's just new research, whether it'll be viable as a commercial product remains to be seen.


That's not right. Those flash drive you mentioned are designed and built by third party companies, certainly not owned by the US government. Just that they are still US company for obvious security reasons. I don't think US Ministry of Defense can afford to design and maintain their own technology for everything they use, but not marketing it. Maybe that's how it works in the past (pre-WWII). AFAIK Intel *IS* currently still the leader in CPU.


Yes fully agree with empire23. Military emphasis is always on reliability and security.
Note that even though we say their technology isn't much better than consumer electronics, "most" consumer stuff available to public are cheaper low tech stuffs. Those leading edge components are usually only use in industrial/enterprise area as they are too expensive and not marketable to mass consumer.

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Added on October 12, 2009, 2:59 pmNewer technology in IC design (still in research) involves adding nanometer scale mechanical parts onto the silicon layer itself. Or was it using some other different material than silicon.
The technology to build tiny projectors (small enough to pack into a handphone) is already here. Couple that with those projected keyboard technology, someone can build an ultra tiny mobile computer already.

This post has been edited by tgrrr: Oct 12 2009, 02:59 PM

Is heat really a problem ? If the computer is that small, I wonder how much heat it can produce, something bigger should logically produce more heat, isn't it ?

This is called a quantum processor or also known as quantum computer. These processors/computers no longer use bits and bytes to represent data, they use something called Qubits.

If I'm not mistaken, we're still decades away from seeing Intel 2 Quantum lol...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/...90628171949.htm

Love this post, very nicely summarises the problems.

Currently one of the biggest limiting factors for future chips is the silicon itself. There are limits to how thin and small you can make the silicon before it sort of disintegrates with electricity or behaves in a very strange way.

About that military thing, I believe that they do have slightly better stuff, but not on the battlefield. Programs like Echelon use some serious tech to do the things that they do, but at a semiconductor level, I doubt that they've got more magical stuff than consumers. But when we talk about technology in terms of complete systems and software, they've got better stuff, largely because such things are too expensive for any company to make money out of by selling to consumers or because the tech is restricted.

Heat is a big big problem. When you make so many things so small, you will pack them all up together in a small place.

Imagine it like this. You take 100 big candles and put it all over your house and measure the heat of the house compared to you take 100 small candles and put it all in one tiny container and measure the heat of that container.

When you stuff so many things into a small place, where all the little things emit heat, then the whole thing becomes very hot. Try turning on your PC with the processor heat sink removed, then touch the processor. It'll burn your finger and then proceed to melt.

That is only the time difference isn't it ? Tiny container will heat up faster but given a sufficient time, heat emitted by big candles will surpass small candles when thermal equilibrium is achieved.

What really matters is how the chips are constructed and designed to work. A big chip that is designed to run maybe 10000 tasks should be hotter than one small chip which is just running a single process. Of course, a chip in a small computer is going to run more processes than the bigger computer since you can only have limited chips on a small board of a small computer ... maybe this is the answer to my question

Just my rough guess

This post has been edited by JustForFun: Oct 13 2009, 12:01 AM

What's relevant is the amount of space and heat-sinking capability.

Big candles spread out in a house has the whole area to spread it's heat to. Small candles in a tiny box can heat up the tiny box faster. When it reaches critical temperature junction, thermal runaway could occur where higher temperature creates more resistance which in turns generates more heat and the tiny box meltdown soon after.