Hewlett Packard Capitalizes on Idea Proposed by Stony Brook Researchers

SAN FRANCISCO - Hewlett-Packard (HP) researchers have developed a novel way to create flexible electronic circuits following research published last year by Stony Brook University postdoc, Dmitri Strukov, and Professor Konstantin Likharev , both from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The findings by HP were recently published in the January 24 issue of the British journal, Nanotechnology.

The HP research was built on a concept proposed over a year ago in Nanotechnology by Strukov and Likharev , titled: "CMOL FPGA: a reconfigurable architecture for hybrid digital circuits with two-terminal nanodevices."

Drs. Strukov and Likharev proposed a novel way to overlay a mesh of molecular-scale wires, or nanowires, on top of a conventional chip circuit to move data between the two worlds. Likharev states that this "extends Moore 's Law by 10 to 15 years," referring to an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. It is from this law that performance of chips has increased while the cost has decreased significantly in the past four decades.

The study by the Stony Brook researchers described a denser semiconductor-transistor (CMOS) stack, a technology which is used in chips and a wide variety of analog circuits. The design developed provides a denser stack in the architecture of the circuit while still maintaining comparable time delay to ordinary chips, acceptable power consumption and potentially high defect tolerance.

The HP researchers, based in Palo Alto , California , extended the concept by applying it to traditional class of computer chips, known as field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. Using the ideas developed by the two Stony Brook professors, the HP design devised a way to shrink the density of the chip up to eight times without shrinking the transistor. The company stated that this development could extend the life of current chip-making technologies.

"We've demonstrated a credible means for shrinking circuit density without shrinking transistors," said Stan Williams, director of quantum science research at HP Labs.

The Stony Brook and HP design will make it possible to build FPGA circuits that are one-eighth to one-tenth the scale of today's commercial chips. The advantage would be the consumption of less power than conventional microchips at a much lower cost.