Database on a chip saves money
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Database on a Silicon Chip
DataCenters use one hundred times as much power as other businesses.
A lot of what they do in Data Centers is data lookups. We have designed a
specialized computer chip to do them faster while using one thousand times less
power than conventional chips.
We need $1 million to get the design onto Silicon so we can show that it
does save electricity. Whoever produces such a chip first will make a lot of
money while saving the environment!
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Problem or Market Opportunity
Chip factories and data centers can consume 100 times more power than a typical industrial business. Wall Street Journal 2024-03-29 A14
Electricity demand to power data centers is projected to increase by 13%
to 15% com- pounded annually through 2030. Yet a shortage of power is already
delaying new data centers by two to six years, according to commercial- real
estate firm CBRE Group. It is also driving Big Tech companies into the energy
business. Amazon this month struck a $650 million deal to buy a data center in
Pennsylvania powered by an on-site 2.5 gigawatt nuclear plant. Wall Street
Journal 2024-03-29 A14
High speed, low power database system on a chip. The need for faster
graphics produced the GPU industry. The need to secure crypto currencies
quickly produced the bitcoin miner industry. Most commercial data processing
is about looking stuff up. There is an opportunity to build application specific integrated circuit chips that do
database look-ups quickly and to sell these chips to Cloud Computing companies
solely on the basis that they will lower their electricity bills.
Solution/Product to be Developed
An application specific integrated circuit mask for a chip dedicated to high speed data look up and a working
chip produced from that mask. Obviously a working Silicon sample whose
performance could be measured would be a crucial proof that Database on a Chip has value.
Use of Semiconductors in Solution
Using semiconductors to perform look ups in nanoseconds rather then using
software to do such look ups in microseconds.
Layers of flash memory and Static Random Access Memory integrated in a vertical stack with close to
memory processing using conventional gates to perform high speed database look
ups in parallel on the stored data one thousand times faster than can be done in
software and using one thousandth of the electrical power. Chips connected to
each other via optical Ethernet in parallel to provide scale with Terahertz
transmission rates between them and with the outside world.
Current or Expected Customers
Cloud Computing data centers with large electricity bills.
Potential Market Size
Perhaps savings on the order of $100 million per year.
In rough terms, it might be possible to reduce global data center
electricity usage by 1% which might lead to potential savings of $100 million
per year. Such savings would be split with the data centers to give them an
incentive to adopt this technology while creating profits to reward investors
to drive new designs.
The initial sales would be driven by real, hard money savings resulting from
reduced electricity bills. But, being able to look things up quickly, faster
than a competitor, might well bestow unexpected other benefits which might make
such chips valuable in as yet unknown applications, perhaps, for example:
analyzing the movements of the stock market for financial companies. If such
unexpected benefits did materialize then the capability to produce such chips
at scale would be that much more the profitable.
There are also softer benefits like being able to claim green credentials in
advertising cloud computing. Gmail is apparently run partly on hydro
electricity from Bonneville Dam .
According to the IEA
world production of electricity is: 10 trillion kilowatt hours per year.
Data centers use about 1% of that electricity. Say we could reduce data
center electricity usage by 1% that would save 1 billion kilowatt
hours annually. A kilowatt hour costs approximately 10 cents. This
would yield gross savings of $100 million per year.
Splitting the savings with the Cloud Computing data center industry ensures
that they make savings of $50 million per year which might be enough to
incentivize them to use this technology while leaving room for $50
million in profits annually for the mask rights holder.
Describe Your Business Model
Payments for the right to use the mask describing the application specific integrated circuit to produce chips
for sales to Cloud Computing data centers.
Alternatives
The alternative is to continue to use conventional generic CPUs to look up
data in conventional memory. While Moore's Law was still in effect it was too
expensive to develop specialist techniques for data look up because the generic
look up techniques provided by conventional CPUs were improving so rapidly. Now
that Moore's Law has run its course there are opening for such specialist
solutions: no doubt some-one will eventually take this opportunity and apply
it to databases.
Competitors
Both Oracle and IBM have products that indicate that they have given
thought to this problem.
DB2 with BLU
Acceleration runs on existing IBM infrastructure. It is a software
solution not a chip level hardware solution.
Oracle
Exadata is a conventional computer optimized with appropriate memory,
disk drives and network options to provide an optimal conventional computing
environment in which to run an Oracle database. But there is no evidence of
any new chip design being used to power this solution.
In summary, both of these important database vendors are aware that hardware
acceleration is beneficial to database processing but they have not moved
beyond the constraints of conventional solutions. Given that both companies
operate in mature markets, a break through on this area would surely have to
be of great interest to them.
Other companies are also attempting to address this issue from the software
side: DataEngine The
DataEngine is a containerized computing environment that customers deploy on
their choice of CPUs, GPUs and DPUs. Obviously they would be much better
off if they could do this in hardware instead of software.
Likewise PineCone which is using in
memory databases in much the same way as BLU acceleration. Using conventional
memory is not enough, they should be adding logic, in situ, to the memory so
processing can be done quickly in hardware close to the memory rather than
slowly in conventional hardware far from the memory.
Influx data offers sub-second queries
so again their implementation must be a software one. We want to offer nano
second queries so our solution must be a hardware one.
My personal favorite: bit.io -
full marks for a great name while using Postgres but still doing things in
software not in Silicon .
All of these companies like to mention that they make artificial intelligence applications easier
and faster. We could too!
Competitive Advantage
The very real possibility of saving hard money in real Cloud Computing
centers by reducing the time and electricity needed to perform database look-ups
by a factor of one thousand.
Intellectual Property
Mask for application specific integrated circuit implementing Database on a Chip.
Go to Market (Marketing & Sales) Strategy
Send a fax to each of the major Cloud Computing data center operators -
Amazon Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform etc. explaining the benefits
with a sample chip mounted on a printed circuit board following in the mail for them to test by
plugging the printed circuit board into an Ethernet router and doing some fast look ups.
Copies to Oracle to keep them apprised of the situation.
Feasibility Demonstration
Plug a printed circuit board board with such a chip mounted on it into an Ethernet router and
show that it quickly answers queries against a preloaded data set.
Key Future Technical and Customer Milestones & Deliverables
Construct proposed mask in software and test through emulation. This
task has been done using our purpose built Electronic Design Automation tools but needs to be cross
checked with industry standard tools to confirm expected operation.
Use the mask to create a demo chip in hardware and mount on a printed circuit board
Send the printed circuit board to well known data center operators for evaluation
Report the real savings from one customer to persuade more customers that they must follow
Sustained production at TSMC ltd in Arizona to supply follow on demand
Current & Desired Partnerships
None currently. Desired: Organization that can provide expertise in
converting a design emulated in software to one realized in hardware.
We are looking for a series A round with a 10% raise of $1
million against a valuation of $10 million.
What are your biggest challenges?
We have produced a Graphic Design System 2 file representing the mask of our proposed chip. The
mask represents a digital circuit that looks up a key in a B-Tree . Graphic Design System 2 is the
de facto industry standard for Electronic Design Automation data exchange of integrated circuits.
Our design has been verified by emulating the actions of the low level gates
used in its construction. We need help converting this mask into a working chip
that we can send to people for evaluation.
Here is our gate level design of a chip that does fast database look-ups:
Gate level tape out
for B-Tree algorithm produced by Silicon Chip .
What are your greatest perceived risks?
That some well funded company will seize on this idea before we have made
enough progress at the hardware level and get there first.
What do you expect from the ChipStart program?
Expertise in the basics of chip manufacture to help us produce a working
chip from our existing design plus all the usual stuff that goes with that:
tools, personnel skilled in using these tools, the means to pay these people,
financial backing, funding advice etc.
Income or Revenue Expected in 12 & 24 Months
Unknown
Current Cash Balance & Monthly Cash Burn Rate
None
Amount of Funding Needed in 12 & 24 Months
Unknown.
Previous Funding & Capital Raised, & From Whom
None
Primary Expected Expenses by Major Category
Unknown.
We probably do not need office space as this work can be done anywhere in
the world including, for the most part, from home offices as long as they as
equipped with a usable workstation and high speed Internet access.
Exit Strategy (Licensing, Acquisition, IPO)
Oracle might want to buy this intellectual property just like they bought
MySql because doing so would give them a jump start on the technology while
denying that capability to their competitors in an otherwise mature industry.
Appendix A: EDA Software used
Our Silicon Chip Electronic Design Automation software is written entirely in Java .
