IBM has made three breakthroughs that could help chips continue following Moore’s Law. Monday at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, IBM showed off the first racetrack memory device that delivers an entirely new means to get electrons to hold data, as well as two materials breakthroughs that could lead to faster chips and even open up new spectrum bands that would be useful for delivering mobile broadband.

IBM’s 3 big chip breakthroughs explained — Tech News and Analysis

Racetrack memory

The prototype chip consists of 256 Racetrack cells.

Each cell consisted of a single magnetic nanowire, 60-240 nanometres wide and 15-20 nanometres thick. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre.

Electric pulses are applied to the wires creating “domain walls” with “regions” between them.

These regions pass over a magnetic read/write head which faces them in one direction or another, representing the 0s and 1s of computer data.

The small magnetic regions can be “raced” at speed along the wires – giving the technique its name.

Advocates of Racetrack claim it could potentially read and write data hundreds of thousands of times faster than is possible on commercial hard disks.

That would put access speeds at roughly the rate offered by DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) chips. These are already used in current PCs to run programs, but “forget” data as soon as the computers’ power supplies are switched off.

BBC News – IBM scientists unveil Racetrack memory chip prototype

Graphene

It is tougher than diamond, but stretches like rubber. It is virtually invisible, conducts electricity and heat better than any copper wire and weighs next to nothing. Meet graphene — an astonishing new material which could revolutionise almost every part of our lives.

If it lives up to its promise, it could lead to mobile phones that you roll up and put behind your ear, high definition televisions as thin as wallpaper, and bendy electronic newspapers that readers could fold away into a tiny square.

Graphene is so strong a sheet of it as thin as clingfilm could support an elephant | Mail Online

Carbon nanotubes

Twisting is found to transform the metallic nanotube to a semiconducting one with a band-gap that varies with the twist angle as shown. IBM Research

IBM introduced nanotechnology with their ‘Scanning Tunneling Microscope’ over 20 years ago. They won a Nobel Prize in Physics for it. They have been investigating atomic applications ever since, including a 10 atom sized abacus of all things. In the last 5 years IBM has been racing towards a practical method of manufacturing nanoscale circuits.

While already being considered in varied applications ranging from solar cells to displays, it is expected that computers with in the next decade will use transistors with a channel length below 10 nm, a length scale at which conventional silicon technology will have extreme difficulty performing even with new advanced device architectures. The scaled carbon nanotube devices below 10nm gate length are a significant breakthrough for future applications in computing technology.

IBM News room – 2011-12-05 Made in IBM Labs: Researchers Demonstrate Future of Computing with Graphene, Racetrack and Carbon Nanotube Breakthroughs – United States

There is evidence that organizations will continue to decentralize beyond multi-disciplinary teams and matrix structures. For it cannot be coincidence that technology continues to find its value in individual empowerment.  When it introduced the personal computer (PC) in the early 1980s, IBM threatened its own existence by subcontracting its birthright to Microsoft and Intel in one of the most spectacularly failed bets against empowerment in the technological age.  It marked one of the only times it did not use its own internally developed hardware and operating systems.  IBM quickly headed towards bankruptcy as the PC and the resulting explosion of technology forced the computer industry into a massive restructuring that left the mini-computer industry in a shambles; companies like DEC, Prime, HP, Control Data, Wang and TI saw their product lines obliterated with their own viability along with them.

IBM under Louis Gerstner saved itself from ruin in one of the most astounding turnaround examples of decentralization ever attempted. It may be that IBM’s present structure now mirrors many organizational fundamentals laid out on this website partly because it at one time so firmly rejected them.  The organization restructured from a hierarchical, unidirectional corporate culture to a broader based, decentralized one in less than 5 years.  They rejected their blue suits, sold buildings and ended up with almost half their workforce working from home in their pajamas.  They re-centered and refocused, and reversed their services and hardware mix of business on services, and sales and profits exploded.

Now IBM has obliterated most of its corporate hierarchy.  It relies on multi-disciplinary teams that reflect combinations of geography, function, customer segment and industry focus, depending on the situation.  They involve themselves in the open source communities which would have been unthinkable in their proprietary days of yesteryear.  But surely none of this expansion of adaptability and profitability and productivity would have occurred if their competitors and the markets had not forced them to react to preserve their viability.

To be fair, who could have predicted the explosion of creativity and innovation of turning millions of PC users into active entrepreneurs? After all, computing economics clearly show that centralized networks with dumb terminals are much less expensive to design and maintain.  That was the overwhelming organization of the computer industry even in the mini-computer world.  That hierarchy looks great on paper and proves more inexpensive to produce, purchase, maintain and deliver computing power.  Those economics remain true to this day.

But one huge factor was left out of the equation.  What was missing was the idea of autonomy. What was missing was the degree that control suppresses creativity. What was missing was an understanding of developmental psychology. What was missing was an in-depth appreciation of just how intrinsic complex systems (in this case free markets) are to innovation.  What was missing was just how incredibly productive users could be if they weren’t sitting around waiting for centralized IT department programmers and instead could themselves develop applications and mash-ups and innovations.

Corporate organizational structure is still hampering productivity, creativity and reliability.  Organizations both in their structure and their strategy often make bets against the individual, and they continue to do so in pendulum like swings in both micro and macro trends. They always eventually lose.  If you don’t believe me, ask IBM.

References

Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons

The above picture symbolizes both technology and organizational change. Still wet behind the ears, in 1991 I was purchasing used mini-Vax systems as servers for Novell networks. They were faster and more inexpensive than PC’s, and cold room costs were sunk. Those pricing trends foreshadowed mini-computer markets.

If I remember correctly, we were the first in the state to cobble Vax systems together with Novell networks. Back then Peter Norton, not Bill Gates, was a G~d to teenage nerds everywhere, driving Microsoft and Intel innovation, and no self-respecting 80286 PC went without a QEMM-386 to make it effective.

This period also marked the last attempt by IBM’s misguided proprietary corporate policies regarding PS/2, which all nerds knew would inevitably fail.  It signified IBM’s continued denial regarding the structural change PC’s represented for technology.  No programmer I ever knew willingly dealt with it.

Aims for 40% cost reductions in the design, deployment and management of e-service blends

As governments and businesses across Europe increasingly rely on information and e-services from a myriad of industries and sectors — from transportation, energy and water, to housing and health care — there is a growing desire among them to have the ability to combine the core competencies their proprietary systems offer with core competencies of other organizations, to achieve greater results that transfer into enhanced, smarter, more cost-effective customer services.

“Today, companies need to invest a considerable amount of time, expertise, and maintenance to develop ad hoc proprietary systems that coordinate these myriad e-services,” explained Professor Guiseppe De Giacomo, University of Rome La Sapienza. “More often than not, these systems are application specific and do not have the flexibility to support variations that stem from different geographical regions or shifts in the marketplace, and are not able to scale up as the business grows.”

Source: IBM and European Union Join to Develop New Collaborative e-Business Model Extending Open Source and Cloud Technologies

The idea is to provide a cloud hosted hub based on ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) which can combine unique service offerings and more effectively hand-off processes and data.  After all, the government manages upwards of 40% of the economy (and growing) in many European countries.  This development gives small business a better chance to participate.

The application will push cloud computing technology by enabling and operating an open source semantic language entirely within the cloud.  The benefits are rather large for business – pay for usage without up front capital costs along with the natural scalability of cloud technology – and provide integrative services across a broad spectrum of industries and business providers.

In an era where even the vast ocean of government data is difficult to obtain for potentially interested businesses, this is an interesting development to say the least.  Readers of this website will intuit the author’s great respect for IBM. Their ability to restructure and thrive after having so drastically bungled their strategy in personal computing technology, gifting their own future to Microsoft and Intel, is one of the storied turnarounds in the modern age.  It is decades later, and they have long ago successfully moved on.