|
123webguru News Desk
Hey, Don't Toss Those Fishy Chips
This story has been updated to note that Melvin Breuer's research was supported by the chip industry.
Consumer electronics could be a whole lot cheaper if chip manufacturers stopped throwing out all their defective chips, according to a researcher at the University of Southern California.
Chip manufacturing is currently very wasteful. Between 20 percent and 50 percent of a manufacturer's total production is tossed or recycled because the chips contain minor imperfections. Defects in just one of the millions of tiny gates on a processor can doom the entire chip.
But USC professor Melvin Breuer believes the imperfections are often too small for humans to even notice, especially when the chips are to be used in video and sound applications.
Identifying and selling these "good enough" chips could save the companies billions and ultimately drive down the cost of electronic devices, according to Breuer. "The bottom line is these guys are throwing away half their product," said Breuer. "It would be nice if they could salvage some of this."
The problem, argues Breuer, is that manufacturers currently throw chips in the defects bin if they fail a test once. But if they used a new suite of tests that revealed how often and how reliably chips fail, they might be able to sell those chips to buyers who aren't looking for perfection, he said.
Take, as a simplified example, the case of a math processor that consistently adds "2" to the output of every calculation it makes. While this is a liability for a cash register, it's not a big deal for a device that simply compares numbers.
"If I go into a party and my job is to find the oldest person in the room -- and if someone tells everyone to add 10 to their age -- it doesn't matter," explained Breuer. "I'll still find the oldest person."
The technique doesn't have to be limited to chips that are consistent in their errors. Chips that make errors only once in a while can also be spared, according to Breuer. They just need to end up in devices where humans can tolerate a glitch in the output from time to time.
For instance, a video card could mark one pixel in a million as red instead of blue and an end user probably wouldn't even notice the difference. The same goes for a soundcard in a voicemail application that blurs one word in every thousand. At present, chips failing these tests are usually tossed.
Breuer developed his theory with the help of Intel researcher T.M. Mak and partial funding from the Silicon Research Corporation, a manufacturing industry organization whose members include AMD, IBM and Motorola.
Linley Gwennap, principal analyst for the Linley Group, a chip research firm, believes manufacturers could warm to Breuer's idea. But, he warned that increasing the amount of time it takes to test a chip adds further costs to the manufacturing process. At some point, the added costs overtake the savings from salvaging defective chips.
"You have to look at how much it would cost to build another chip," said Gwennap. "Some of these chips today are selling for $10 or $20. If I'm going to spend $10 of a technician's time to look at these chips and to find out if there's a defect and relabel it, it's cheaper just to make more of these things than to go through the hassle. (But) if it's a chip that costs $100 to build, then now there's an economic incentive. That's where there's going to be more effort."
Breuer acknowledged there are trade-offs to be made. But he has already received interest from one video-chip manufacturer, which he declined to name. His students are currently studying 1,000 of that manufacturer's defective chips to determine whether enough chips can be saved to make further testing worthwhile.
A $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation should help Breuer advance his theory and develop tests that manufacturers can use.
"It's a new paradigm," said Breuer. "Engineers say when you add two numbers, you have a right answer and a wrong answer. What we're saying is you don't have to know the right answer all the time."
News Source
http://www.wired.com
Top News
News of the Week
All News
Website design company
 |
|
123webguru Articles
Open Directory Project
The Open Directory Project (ODP) is a site directory run by volunteer editors. They provide feed for most of the search engines. This is one of the great ...
Ezine, Discussion and Announcement List Etiquette
The information super highway, countless intertwining roads of information all merging into one massive freeway. That's the Internet. Just about any form ...
Selecting a website design company
As more and more business owners are choosing website design based sales promotion, Website design companies came into light. The website design company ...
To Be Successful One on Online
People have been running after the secret of online success and many have not yet found it, many have reached half the way. But each year Internet Marketing ...
World Wide Web
Webpage Development Funda:
Http: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
These are the two terms we all are familiar with now ...
35 Deadly Website Sins That will Kill Your Business!
After reviewing thousands of web sites over the years, I have come to the conclusion that many business web sites are missing the boat.
For example, ...
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
