The Whole Kit and Caboodle

By Ramona DuBose

When it comes to laptops, cellphones and other digital devices, the expectation is that next year’s models will be faster, more innovative, more powerful. Competition is fierce to make transistors in computer chips smaller, cheaper, and more dynamic.

“We are fast approaching the limits of quantum mechanics,” says Rhett Davis ’94, professor of computer engineering at NC State.

To help developers keep improving technology, Davis and his team have devised a “computer chip design kit.” The kit, a predictive process design kit called FreePDK3™, contains a library of specialized tools used for designing chips. Rather than starting from scratch for every new chip, computer scientists can use FreePDK3 to find existing chip design elements on which to build their breakthroughs.

FreePDK3 was developed at NC State with financial and technical support from Synopsys, an electronic design automation company headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. The kit is available at no charge to encourage and support innovation in the field of chip design by allowing more people — especially students and researchers — to have access to critical tools. With fewer companies able to keep up with the fast-paced technology — and most of those outside of the U.S. — state-of-the-art innovations are often unavailable to independent developers. 

As for the limits of quantum mechanics, not long ago, leading computer scientists like Davis thought the size limits of transistors that make up microchips was 15 nanometers — a nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter. (There are about 100,000 nanometers in the width of a human hair.) But companies may now be creating transistors as small as three or even two nanometers.