{"id":96647,"date":"2019-09-24T19:43:44","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T02:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/goodbye-motherboard-hello-silicon-interconnect-fabric"},"modified":"2019-09-24T19:43:44","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T02:43:44","slug":"goodbye-motherboard-hello-silicon-interconnect-fabric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/goodbye-motherboard-hello-silicon-interconnect-fabric","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye, Motherboard. Hello, Silicon-Interconnect Fabric"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>The need to make<\/strong> some hardware systems tinier and tinier and others bigger and bigger has been driving innovations in electronics for a long time. The former can be seen in the progression from laptops to smartphones to smart watches to <a href=\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/consumer-electronics\/audiovideo\/hearables-will-monitor-your-brain-and-body-to-augment-your-life\">hearables<\/a> and other \u201cinvisible\u201d electronics. The latter defines today\u2019s commercial data centers\u2014megawatt-devouring monsters that fill purpose-built warehouses around the world. Interestingly, the same technology is limiting progress in both arenas, though for different reasons.<\/p>\n<p>The culprit, we contend, is the printed circuit board. And the solution is to get rid of it.<\/p>\n<p>Our research shows that the printed circuit board could be replaced with the same material that makes up the chips that are attached to it, namely silicon. Such a move would lead to smaller, lighter-weight systems for wearables and other size-constrained gadgets, and also to incredibly powerful high-performance computers that would <a href=\"https:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/tech-talk\/semiconductors\/processors\/whats-better-than-40-gpubased-servers-a-server-with-40-gpus\">pack dozens of servers\u2019 worth of computing capability onto a dinner-plate-size wafer of silicon<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The need to make some hardware systems tinier and tinier and others bigger and bigger has been driving innovations in electronics for a long time. The former can be seen in the progression from laptops to smartphones to smart watches to hearables and other \u201cinvisible\u201d electronics. The latter defines today\u2019s commercial data centers\u2014megawatt-devouring monsters that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1512,1977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-mobile-phones","category-wearables"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96647\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}