Eco-friendly 3D microchips, being developed by a clutch of cutting-edge research labs, are likely to boost computing power 10-fold, consuming negligible energy. They are being developed jointly by IBM Research Lab, EPFL and ETH Zurich, the twin Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology.
The project, under the leadership of EPFL’s John R. Thome’s (Lausanne), aims to develop processors with as many transistors per cubic centimetre as there are neurons in the entire human brain - a functional density greater than ever before. Not so long ago our computers relied on a single core which had to be boosted for performance - making each machine into a great central heating system.
Beyond 85 degrees Celsius, however, single core electronic components become unstable. This problem was overcome with the multi-core technology, where the same chip includes several processors, sharing tasks. These 3D processors build on the idea of multi-cores. However, the cores are stacked vertically rather than placed side-by-side as in current processors. The advantage is that the entire surface of the core can be connected to the next layer, through 100 to 10,0000 connections per square mm.
