CON101 Assignment 6: Post Silicon Architecture

Satyam Kumar Modi, 2019CS50448

November 13, 2020

1 Introduction
CPUs are an integral part of the computer system that decides the system
performance and are responsible for the uninterrupted and faster response from
the computer. It not only executes the instructions at a faster rate but also
allows us to perform multiple tasks at the same time. So, it’s a very natural
question to ask what factors lead to a good cpu performance. Well, it is the
increased clock frequency that makes the computer faster in executing tasks
at the faster rate along with the technology scaling. The first CPU came into
existence in 1971 by the Intel Corporation. Since then till 2005, the CPU
performance has increased at a tremendous rate. But since 2005, the processor
performance has saturated. The reason beyond this is that the clock rate has
increased to such an extent that it leads to much higher heat dissipation as
the power consumption is very high. So, now the industry aims to reduce such
a heating and to come up with a cooling system that remove the waste heats
produced by the computer components. This brings us to a stage where we
need to shift ourselves from silicon-based transistors to some other material.

2 Graphene
Graphene has made a new revolution in the area of electronic materials for
use in a wide range of materials.It has a two-dimensional nature that allows
it to generate multi electron-hole pairs for very high energy photon excitation.
When coupling graphene to a bus waveguide can enhance light absorption over
a broad spectrum. Silicon based processors can perform a certain amount of
task without overheating. But electrons move through graphene with almost no
resistance and thus, generate a little amount of heat.Besides these, electronics
made out of graphene can also be useful in communication technology that
requires high-frequency applications such as tetrahertz-wave imaging which is
used to detect hidden weapons.Silicon can’t be carved into pieces smaller than
10 nanometres without losing its electronic properties. On the other hand, the
physics of graphene remains the same and research shows that its conductivitty
actually improves in pieces smaller than a single nanometer.Graphene has also

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proved to be highly useful in manufacturing of field-effect transistors because of
its high mobility of electrons.

3 Spintronics
Electronic materials that involves the use of spintronics exploit the spin proper-
ties of electrons(especially the magnetic moment). We don’t require an external
energy source to maintain a particular-spin in a magnetic device. This property
makes spintronic devices non-volatile and low-power consuming.Spintronics has
helped in creating of a prototype device which is used in industry as a read
head and a memory storage cell. Spin diodes are another important applica-
tion of spintronics in which the current could be changed by varying the spin
polarization of recombination centers. The flow of spin polarized carriers can
also be used to manipulate the magnetization of ferromagnetic materials. Such
researches have played a major role in develoment of new electronic devices.

4 Quantum Computing
Quantum computing is based on the fundamental concept of quantum informa-
tion. In these, the information is represented as quantum states by exploiting
the quantum effects like quantum superposition, quantum entanglement, etc.
Here,we have a quantum register that allows us to represent all possible clas-
sical values simultaneously. Quantum CPUs use a quantum bus for communi-
cation between the functional elements of a quantum computer For computing,
quantum CPUs use the quantum building blocks like quantum adders based on
Fourier transform,quantum carry select adders to realize quantum computations
in different architectural models. The architecture of the quantum computer was
optimized by the Shor’s factoring algorithm. Thus, quantum computing proves
to be a new way to optimize computer performance.