2007, good year for Moore’s Law

IBM ended a brilliant 2007 with the news about a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator the smallest electro-optic modulator yet, that will allow the connection of multiple processing cores inside a chip by using beams of light, instead of wires. This certainly will help to extend the longevity of Moore’s Law, and IBM knows it:

IBM’s pioneering work to move the industry from aluminum to copper wiring, unveiled in 1997, gave the industry an immediate 35 percent reduction in electron flow resistance and a 15 percent boost in chip performance.

Since then, IBM scientists have continued to drive performance improvements to continue the path of Moore’s Law. And in 2007 alone, IBM announced:

High-k metal gates (January 2007): a solution to one of the industry’s most vexing problems — transistors that leak current. By using new materials IBM will create chips with “high-k metal gates” that will enable products with better performance that are both smaller and more power efficient.

eDRAM (February 2007) – By replacing SRAM with an innovative new type of speedy DRAM on a microprocessor chip, IBM will be able to more than triple the amount of embedded memory and boost performance significantly.

3-D Chip Stacking (April 2007) – IBM announces the creation of three-dimensional chips using “through-silicon vias,” allowing semiconductors to be stacked vertically instead of being placed near each other horizontally. This cuts the length of critical circuit pathways by up to 1,000 times.

Airgap (May 2007) – Using a “self assembly” nanotechnology IBM has created a vacuum between the miles of wire inside a Power Architecture microprocessor reducing unwanted capacitance and improving both performance and power efficiency.
IBM’s pioneering work to move the industry from aluminum to copper wiring, unveiled in 1997, gave the industry an immediate 35 percent reduction in electron flow resistance and a 15 percent boost in chip performance.

Ditto

Filed under: Technology

One Time Pads

There is certain fascination with the One Time Pad (or Vernam cipher) among people interested in cryptography.
One of the reasons is the famous fact that it is the only provably secure cipher. Shannon`s theoretical insight cemented the fame of the OTP as the only truly unbreakable cipher. For those that already don`t know how it works and why it is unbreakable the following links will give a very good intro:

Dirk`s Rijmenants website, “A one-time pad isn’t a cryptosystem:” it’s a state of mind and of course the entry at Wikipedia

Another reason is the spy-vs-spy aspect of the OTP. The NSA’s VENONA pages abound in details about the successful deciphering of many KGB documents enciphered with OTPs during 1942 and 1980. The KGB’s cryptographic material manufacturing center apparently reused some of the pages from one-time pads, breaking one of the fundamental rules of the OTPs, use the random material only once.

Filed under: Infomation Theory