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Design007-Jan2022

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JANUARY 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 77 Matties: I get the point, but I still think that there's going to be a tool in the near future that is going to change the design dynamics. I could be wrong, but we hear about it. Amla: I just hope so. Ritchey: Will you send me an email when you see one (laughs)? Matties: Right. Now there's a lot of chatter, but chatter doesn't matter until you see it, as they say. Amla: Unfortunately, the real AI, the kind of stuff that people like Stephen Wolfram and others talk about, that's not happen- ing. All that people are doing right now is "curve fitting." We're not talking about real AI, and emergent phenom- e n a l i k e c e l l u l a r automata. If you're optimistic about AI, that's a good thing. But it's going to be tough. M a t t i e s : Do you think we're going to have an AI break- through anytime soon in design tools? Amla: Ray Kurzweil says that in a few years' time, we will have reached singularity, but that means a lot of work would need to be done really fast. Ritchey: So, before we close, we were talking about 56 gigabits per second, and a question is, "Well, why don't we just double the clock rate?" So, here's a little bit of math. At 56 gigabit per second, a bit period is a little bit less than 20 picoseconds, which means you must have a piece of silicon that can go from zero to one and back in that amount of time, which is implying that we have rise times that are under 10 pico- seconds. And I would never have guessed we could do what we're doing right now, and the prospect of doubling that, I think, just might be on the limits of what silicon can do. Amla: Exactly. Ritchey: And that's our dilemma. Until now, we've just doubled the clock rate. We just keep doing it, doing it, doing it, and now we've hit the point where the I/O transistors just can't go up and down that fast. I would like to dou- ble the clock rate, but I must be hon- est with you, I was surprised that we were doing it this fast, because that's a 28 gigahertz clock. A n d t h a t i s v e r y, ver y high micro- wave frequency that the rest of the world would call RF for microwave, and we call it digital, which is pretty amazing. Matties: Perfect. I really enjoyed our conversation today, and it's always good to catch up with you. Lee and Tarun, thank you. Ritchey: ank you. Amla: anks. DESIGN007 Tarun Amla is president and COO of Thintronics. Lee Ritchey is owner of Speeding Edge.

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