HVAC Control in the New Millennium.pdf - HVAC.Amickracing

HVAC Control in the New MillenniumPhysical LimitationsPower and heat management become major problems as transistorscontinue to shrink. The gate oxides become very thin in order tomaintain the required transistor switching speeds. This forces low voltageoperation in order to maintain their structural integrity. Intel microprocessorchips 10 years from now may operate at less than 1 volt andcould consume 40 to 50 watts of power. This implies 40- to 50-amp currents.Evenly distributing this amount of current within the chip anddissipating the heat generated are both potential problems.Current silicon fabrication methods may hit physical limits by theyear 2017, which many have predicted. At this point, it will not be possibleto build usable transistors any smaller.By that time, research into areas such as molecular nanotechnology,optical or photonic computing, quantum computing, DNA computing,chaotic computing and other areas of research may be more common.Molecular nanotechnology involves the manufacturing of a electronicchip with tiny programmable assemblers to move individual atomsas discussed in Chapter 3. This technology would move devicesinto the nanometer range rather than tenths of microns as it is now. Anentire computer made this way would be about the size of a sugar cube.Photonic computing involves using beams of light for computingfunctions. Quantum computing technology involves the study of electronsfloating in liquid helium as computing elements.DNA computing is patterned after the way DNA stores informationvery efficiently. The DNA strands can find each other among thousandsof other strands. Synthetic molecules called lipsomes are used forsearches that requires massive parallel processing. It is also calledbiomolecular computing. Chaotic computing attempts to apply chaossciencetheory to the management of computer networks.There are apt to be major changes in the design and manufactureof microprocessors and the way they perform computer operations. Thismeans that as fabrication technologies sustain enormous changes in thecoming years, the microprocessor architectures that are used today includinglogic designs, instruction sets, registers and external interfacesare bound to change. Expect to see more complex 32-bit x 86 processorsfrom AMD, Cyrix, Intel, and others in the near future.Intel and Hewlett Packard have developed the EPIC (ExplicitlyParallel Instruction Computing) instruction set technology. This is de-©2001 by The Fairmont Press, Inc. All rights reserved.