i remember there was a diode and transistor that were literally completely seperated from the traces of the rest of the chip, and yet they were functional pieces and the chip wouldnt work if you removed them.
If that was true they would be getting the Nobel in physics for discovering some incredible new quantum phenomena, it would be front-page news everywhere. I highly doubt it’s true.
Frustratingly, that article you linked doesn’t actually link to the paper. But it is in Nature Communications. That’s a respectable journal but not that prestigious, and it publishes a lot of over hyped stuff. Not that any journal doesn’t. But if they had really found new physics with AI chip design that would go to Science, Nature, or maybe PRL.
Chip design isn’t at all my specialty so take my opinion about this with a grain of salt. But I think it’s notable that
Prior works in nanophotonics have demonstrated the class of inverse methods for specific dielectric-based passive structures through gradient based optimizations such as adjoint method
So, there are already known algorithmic approaches to solving for these. I think it’s also notable that these are for signal transformation and antennae, relatively simple operations.
This seems like a vaguely useful result but I don’t expect it’ll be breaking any new ground any time soon.
Nah, it wasnt anything truly revolutionary. It was just some weird impedence effect we didnt fully understand how it was utilizing. AI doesnt really produce NEW stuff, but its really good at taking advantage of physics weve already worked out. Its not going to design a NEW chip, but it can pretty easily optimize existing chips or design a “new” layout that might be more efficient.
Confidently incorrect about how fragile some circuits can be. Simple functionality is a convenient illusion we’ve beaten into various squiggles of metal. Electricity is secretly also a radio and a magnet, and even in wires it can’t know there’s nothing at the end until it gets there. Sometimes things just happen.
They’re fabricating micrometer components with a 90 nm process. That’s pretty well in the classical regime. If they’re seeing substantial tunneling at that scale it would be rather noteworthy to say the least.
If that was true they would be getting the Nobel in physics for discovering some incredible new quantum phenomena, it would be front-page news everywhere. I highly doubt it’s true.
Frustratingly, that article you linked doesn’t actually link to the paper. But it is in Nature Communications. That’s a respectable journal but not that prestigious, and it publishes a lot of over hyped stuff. Not that any journal doesn’t. But if they had really found new physics with AI chip design that would go to Science, Nature, or maybe PRL.
Edit: ah, I found it.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-54178-1
Chip design isn’t at all my specialty so take my opinion about this with a grain of salt. But I think it’s notable that
So, there are already known algorithmic approaches to solving for these. I think it’s also notable that these are for signal transformation and antennae, relatively simple operations.
This seems like a vaguely useful result but I don’t expect it’ll be breaking any new ground any time soon.
Nah, it wasnt anything truly revolutionary. It was just some weird impedence effect we didnt fully understand how it was utilizing. AI doesnt really produce NEW stuff, but its really good at taking advantage of physics weve already worked out. Its not going to design a NEW chip, but it can pretty easily optimize existing chips or design a “new” layout that might be more efficient.
Confidently incorrect about how fragile some circuits can be. Simple functionality is a convenient illusion we’ve beaten into various squiggles of metal. Electricity is secretly also a radio and a magnet, and even in wires it can’t know there’s nothing at the end until it gets there. Sometimes things just happen.
They’re fabricating micrometer components with a 90 nm process. That’s pretty well in the classical regime. If they’re seeing substantial tunneling at that scale it would be rather noteworthy to say the least.
It’s not tunneling, it’s capacitance. Even truly disconnected components can accidentally become a transformer.
A single diode a micrometer away from anything else is not suddenly a transformer without which a 400 um2 antenna stops working.