""" Aluminium nitride (AlN) is a solid nitride of aluminium. It has a high thermal conductivity of up to 321 W/(m·K)[5] and is an electrical insulator. Its wurtzite phase (w-AlN) has a band gap of ~6 eV at room temperature and has a potential application in optoelectronics operating at deep ultraviolet frequencies.

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Manufacture

AlN is synthesized by the carbothermal reduction of aluminium oxide in the presence of gaseous nitrogen or ammonia or by direct nitridation of aluminium.[22] The use of sintering aids, such as Y2O3 or CaO, and hot pressing is required to produce a dense technical-grade material.[citation needed] Applications

Epitaxially grown thin film crystalline aluminium nitride is used for surface acoustic wave sensors (SAWs) deposited on silicon wafers because of AlN's piezoelectric properties. Recent advancements in material science have permitted the deposition of piezoelectric AlN films on polymeric substrates, thus enabling the development of flexible SAW devices.[23] One application is an RF filter, widely used in mobile phones,[24] which is called a thin-film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR). This is a MEMS device that uses aluminium nitride sandwiched between two metal layers.[25] """

Speculation: it's present use suggests that at commercially viable quantities it might be challenging to use as a thermal interface compound. I've also never previously considered the capacitive properties of packaging components and realize of course that's required. Use of Al O as a heat conductor is so far outside of my expertise...

Could a materials expert elaborate how viable / expensive this compound is for the rest of us?

A toroidal shape would allow more interconnects to be interspaced throughout the design as well as more heat-transfer points alongside the data transfer interconnects.

Something like chiplet design where each logical section is a complete core or even an SOC with a robust interconnect to the next and previous section.

If that were feasible, you could build it onto a hollow tube structure so that heat could be piped out from all sides once you sandwich the chip in a wraparound cooler.

I guess the idea is more scifi than anything, though. I doubt anyone other than ARM or RISC-V would ever even consider the idea until some other competitor proves the value.

Rip out all the special purpose bits that make it non-uniform, and thus hard to route.

Rip out all of the long lines and switching fabric that optimizes for delays, and replace it all with only short lines to the neighboring cells. This greatly reduces switching energy.

Also have the data needed for every compute step already loaded into the cells, eliminating the memory/compute bottleneck.

Then add a latch on every cell, so that you can eliminate race conditions, and the need to worry about timing down to the picosecond.

This results in a uniform grid of Look Up Tables (LUTS) that get clocked in 2 phases, like the colors of the chessboard. Each cell thus has stable inputs, as they all come from the other phase, which is latched.

I call it BitGrid.

I'd give it a 50/50 chance of working out in the real world. If it does, it'll mean cheap PetaFlops for everyone.

But neural networks are non-Von Neumann, and we 'program' them using backprop. This can also be applied to cellular automata.

A rocket and a sandblaster at the same time.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/silicon-quantum-computing-purified...

Of course cost would have to be acceptable.