Intel Researchers See Moore's Law Becoming Obsolete

prostoalex writes "A paper, published by Intel researchers, claims we might be the witnesses of Moore's Law becoming obsolete, as the rate of shrinkage for transistors goes lower with each year. In 2018 we might be able to get the chips manufactured with 16-nanometer technology, then one or two more manufacturing processes will shrink it even further, but after that we're facing the physical limits."

Comments

Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[__aavhli5779]

I think several upstarts are soon going to be ready to extend Moore's law for at least another few decades, thanks to diamond semiconductors.

Silicon is, indeed, close to its limit, but that does not mean semiconductors are.

This Wired article, which I'm sure many of you have read, details how new industrially-produced diamonds, thanks to their cheap price and purity (most importantly, being absolutely identical to each other), along with research done by both the government, several corporations, and possibly Intel, may make unbelievably fast systems powered by diamond semiconductors possible.

Some interesting quotes:

But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.

Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:

Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."

Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

This is assuming that De Beers doesn't push these people off a high rise first. :/

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[IvyMike]

There's nothing fundamental about diamond that will change electron tunnelling. The Intel paper was not silicon specific--to quote the article itself:

The tunneling effects, Gargini said, will occur regardless of the chemistry of the transistor materials. Several researchers over the years have predicted the end of Moore's Law but made the mistake of extrapolating on the basis of existing materials.

The concept behind the Intel researchers' paper was, "why don't we do something based entirely on fundamental principles?" Gargini said. "The beauty of our paper is that it is independent of materials."

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously didn't RTFA.

These fundemental limitations are not material specific. When you get geometric feature sized on your transistor where the source and sink are within 4-5nm of each other, the electrons can tunnel from source to sink more than 50% of the time, regardless of the field imposed on the electron. Therefore it cannot be used as a basis for a logic circuit. Essentially you are killed by Heisenberg uncertainty.

I agree, Diamond based transistors look very very promising, mostly for their thermal properties. When you can maintain a very high thermal gradiant, while maintaining your semi-conductor properies, you can clock the chips much faster without having to worry about overheating and thermal effects, but this research article that Paulos wrote if about a much more fundemental problem.

The content of this paper is pretty much old news, but it is actually promising to see this published by Intel researchers. Intel is well aware of the fundemental limits of its current design, this does not mean the end of Moore's law, in it's most general meaning, this just means that Intel will find new better ways to keep increasing it's core competancy, making amazing CPUs with very low manufacturing costs.

-PT

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Carnildo]

So you're saying that exponential growth can be sustained forever?

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Aardpig]

The article wasn't based on silicon or anyother substance, but fundimental physics.

From my understanding of the article, the limit toted by Intel is based on leakage due to quantum tunnelling over distances of 5 nanometers or less. Now, IAAP (I am a physicist), and I know that tunneling probabilities have an exponential dependence on both distance and the height of the potential barrier which is being penetrated through. This barrier height depends on the particular materials used to manufacture pn semiconductor junctions; therefore, the OP was correct in pointing out that using different materials can get around the problems which silicon will soon meet.

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Zeinfeld]

This is assuming that De Beers doesn't push these people off a high rise first. :/

This would be a thin layer of synthetic diamond, not the mined type that deBeers has a monopoly in.

The fundamental limits are reached sooner in some technologies than others, but there is no technology that is immune from any sort of limit.

Even if there is an alternative technology the transition from silicon to a totally different substrate is something the industry has tried before and conspicuously failled at. There was a time when Galium Assenide was the bees knees, these days it is an important niche (direct band gap and all that) but nobody is building GaAs computers.

The other factor is that there seems to be a tradeoff between the point where you hit the quantum limit in a given technology and electron mobility that bites you in the a**.

I suspect that we see Moore's law start to slow before it comes to a halt.

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[Zeinfeld]

either way, moore's law is dead. Kurzweil suggests that after moore's law, an exponential boost will occour, with the advent of a new technology, not simply in materials, new research all together, in accordance with the aforementioned "thillbert's law" ;)

Progress is not going to end, but the automatic metronome of Moore's law will no longer be the driver. The rate of progress will slow for a while then start to pick up. The Intel paper says as much.

Incidentally the point of the paper seems to be to push out the end date and fend off rivals proposing the same ideas. The tunneling effect is quite definitely the end point of traditional logic gates. The astonishing part of the paper is that the end they cite is a 16nm process (with a 5nm gate), the smallest scale currently in use is 37nm. In other words there are only four more generations to go, two generations resulting in the feature size halving which means four times the number of transistors. So if the old two year schedule were kept Moore's law comes to an end in 2011.

They also point to the fact that Intel themselves have pushed out their dates for adopting new processes and are planning for three year gaps between generations. I have suspected that Intel has been the main factor in keeping the industry to the roadmap of Moore's law for some time.

Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete

[akuma(x86)]

The reason that this calculation is material independent is that there is an additional constraint of power-density on the shape of the energy barrier.

As you mentioned, the tunneling probability is a function of width, barrier height and effective mass of the tunneling particle. We are trying to construct a switch where we can control the flow of the particle from one side of the barrier to the other. In the "on" state, there is no energy barrier, the electron can move freely, and in the "off" state, the barrier is erected. We need to control the tunneling probability such that we can distinguish on from off.

Consider that the Shannon-Von-Neumann-Landauer (SNL) limit for the smallest energy required to process a bit is k_b * T * ln(2) ~= 0.017eV where k_b is the Boltzmann constant and T is temperature. For width > 5nm, this holds as a good approximation for the minimum height of the barrier to maintain a coherent switch. For a 5nm the energy increases as (1/w)^2 where w is the barrier width.

This is a LOT of power when summed over the entire chip area.

They invoke power density arugments that say that it is impractical to have 5-10 MEGAWatt! / cm^2 power density. The rate at which this thermal energy can be removed from a solid is limited -- and THIS is the reason why we can't scale smaller.

Fundamentally, we are power limited.

I am not a physicist, but I do design microprocessors for a living and I did study semiconductor physics in school.

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??

Re:Again?

[kallisti]

We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??

You are aware that Moore's Law is about the doubling of density of transistors and not "computing power" or some such undefinable quantity? Moore's law will be broken simply because physical entities cannot follow an exponential growth for very long. Computing power will still increase.

Re:Again?

[coastwalker]

Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.

I think this paper is 'more' (sigh) significant than many are taking it to be. What they are saying is that the electron will no longer be able to provide us with greater computing power in twenty or so years time. Super computer builders prepared to pay will get a little extra milage out of stacking and clever parallelism but your desktop computer will never get any faster after this time using electronics as we understand it.

What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.

Quantum computers show some possibility along with self organising molecules to instantate them - but we are still at the practical ability to do this, that we were at with electricity when kite flying in the clouds was a good way to study electrons.

It is prahaps somewhat significant that the number of gates on a chip will be comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain by the end of this decade. Maybe we dont need faster computers at all, maybe the clever thing will be expecting a computer to do something that it cannot do at the momment - think for itself. Sadly creating artificial intelligence has proven a brick wall that has almost no mainstream spin off so far unless you count Microsofts ghastly paper clip...

However my bet is that when the megahertz race is over, the new race will be how to make the compute element more intelligent - through a mixture of software and hardware. Sadly it seems to be a lot more than twenty years away as we cant even program all human brains to read and write despite the several hundred thousand years of development that have been applied to the grey matter :-)

Re:Again?

[vsprintf]

We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue.

Agreed, every few years we're supposedly up against limits that will break Moore's Law. I also remember when we finally got 5.25 inch form factor 80 MEGAbyte hard drives. We were supposedly up against the physical limits of electromagnetics, and we couldn't expect any more big improvements. The next step would have to be bubble memory. Besides, nobody needed 80MB of storage anyway. :)

Re:Again?

[Jason1729]

Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.

When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:Again?

[gregorio]

You are aware that Moore's Law is about the doubling of density of transistors and not "computing power" or some such undefinable quantity? Moore's law will be broken simply because physical entities cannot follow an exponential growth for very long. Computing power will still increase.

Nope, Moore's law is about transistor count.

From Intel's website: "Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue. "

Re:Again?

[Hoser McMoose]

To be a tiny bit pedantic, Moore's original paper talked about the number of transistors per integrated circuit at any given price point. You can always stick more transistors on the chip if you're willing to throw sufficient amounts of money at the problem, but to get those transistors for a reasonable price is another matter.

FWIW, Moore's original hypothesis was that the transistors/$ would double every 12 months, so his "law" hasn't been correct for quite some time. We had been seeing a doubling of transistors about every 18 months for a while, but now it's more like every 24 months. With the current troubles that Intel, AMD and IBM all seem to be having at implementing their new 90nm manufacturing process, it seems likely that the pace will continue to slow.

mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

looks like they're gotting slashdotted like Kathleen Fent on her wedding night...

Dec. 1 -- Moore's Law, as chip manufacturers generally refer to it today, is coming to an end, according to a recent research paper.

GRANTED, THAT END likely won't come for about two decades, but Intel researchers have recently published a paper theorizing that chipmakers will hit a wall when it comes to shrinking the size of transistors, one of the chief methods for making chips that are smaller, more powerful and cheaper than their predecessors.
Manufacturers will be able to produce chips on the 16-nanometer manufacturing process, expected by conservative estimates to arrive in 2018, and maybe one or two manufacturing processes after that, but that's it.
"This looks like a fundamental limit," said Paolo Gargini, director of technology strategy at Intel and an Intel fellow. The paper, titled "Limits to Binary Logic Switch Scaling -- A Gedanken Model," was written by four authors and was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in November.
Although it's not unusual for researchers to theorize about the end of transistor scaling, it's an unusual statement for researchers from Intel, and it underscores the difficulties chip designers currently face. The size, energy consumption and performance requirements of today's computers are forcing semiconductor makers to completely rethink how they design their products and are prompting many to pool design with research and development.
Resolving these issues is a major goal for the entire industry. Under Moore's Law, chipmakers can double the number of transistors on a given chip every two years, an exponential growth pattern that has allowed computers to get both cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Mostly, the trick has been accomplished through shrinking transistors. With shrinkage tapped out, manufacturers will have to find other methods to keep the cycle going.
These issues will likely be widely discussed this week, when the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors is unveiled in Taiwan. The ITRS, which is comprised of several organizations, including the Semiconductor Industry Association, outlines the challenges and rough timetable for the industry for 15 years. A new version of the plan will be released in Taiwan on Dec. 2.
Still, Gargini said, researchers are exploring a variety of ideas, such as more efficient use of electrons or simply making bigger chips, to surpass any looming barriers. Other researchers likely will dispute these conclusions.
"We cannot let physics beat us," he said, laughing.

THE DISTINGUISHED CIRCUIT
The problem chipmakers face comes down to distinction and control. Transistors are essentially microscopic on/off switches that consist of a source (where electrons come from), a drain (where they go) and a gate that controls the flow of electrons through a channel that connects the source and the drain.

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When current flows from the source to the drain, a computer reads this as a "1." When current is not flowing, the transistor is read as a "0." Millions of these actions together produce the data inside PCs. Strict control of the gate and channel region, therefore, are necessary to produce reliable results.
When the length of the gate gets below 5 nanometers, however, tunneling will begin to occur. Electrons will simply pass through the channel on their own, because the source and the drain will be extremely close. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
Gargini likens the phenomenon to a waterfall in the middle of a trail. If a person can't see through it, they will take a detour around it. If it is only a thin veil of mist, people will push through.
"Where you have a barrier, the electrons penetrate a certain distance," he said. "Once

thrillbert's law

[thrillbert]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you thrillbert's Law :

This law states that new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.

That is all, you may return to your previously scheduled activity.

---
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.

It's still an issue.

[ActionPlant]

We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level. And with those increased voltages (and the problems of things being crammed so tightly together) we'll see the effects of those electrons in such close proximity resulting in errors. Sure, maybe we won't hit a brick wall for a while as far as how much we can cram onto a chip, but what about the logistics? Will it really be worth the effort if we can't rely on these little marvels to remain accurate?

Damon,

Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out

[JoeBuck]

Engineers will be able to continue the shrink for another 15 years based on what we know now. However, the cost for designing setting up manufacturing for a chip will continue to increase exponentially. It will only be worth the money to do this for a part that can be sold in the billions, and there will be few such parts. The end will come not because the technologists can't reduce feature sizes any further, but because no one will be willing to sink an investment equal to the GDP of a mid-sized country into a fab.

At least, that's the case for CMOS silicon chips. To get Moore's Law to continue to operate in a meaningful way, something completely new is likely to be needed: maybe molecular gates that self-assemble or something equally exotic.

Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out

[ActionPlant]

Your point is exactly what makes the necessity of the "next big thing" essential to the survival of that industry, and which leads me to believe that we'll see the computer industry wind up look a lot like the auto industry. We saw great advancements in the first several decades, but nothing that really changed how the core machine worked; we simply spent 100+ years refining it and improving efficiency and power (and safety). Of course there were always those exotic electic cars, but their use never become too widespread.

Now we're finally on the verge of the next big step; fuel cell autos. Just like they expected cars to fly fifty years after they were invented (but with no real change in the actual technology of the machine), so now we're expecting exotic things like quantum mechanics to be commonplace in computing environments in twenty years.

I think rather we'll see companies settle in; the big ones will survive if they're smart, while others will come on the market with their own claim to fame; shapes, colors, "safety" ratings, and finally government efficienty mandates. It could well be 100 years of "getting it right" before we finally see widespread implementation of a completely new technology.

Damon,

Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out

[anakin876]

[quote] Engineers will be able to continue the shrink for another 15 years based on what we know now [/quote] this should make for an interesting effect. A whole new market will open up in tiny cubicles and desks, with tiny-engineer sized keyboards as well. What will the final engineer size be? Will they finally become small enough that millions can be employed as miniature chip makers themselves, thus solving the problem of high costs associated with the creation of a new chip-fab?

Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out

[Saeger]

The end will come not because the technologists can't reduce feature sizes any further, but because no one will be willing to sink an investment equal to the GDP of a mid-sized country into a fab.

It's a funny coincidence that Moore's Law will hit the wall (S-curve actually) at about the same time that nanotechnology is maturing, allowing for the next paradigm in computing to continue our exponential progress.

Molecular manufacturing -- while still 10 to 20 years away -- means that billion-dollar factories won't be needed to manufacture ANYTHING anymore. Everything, from food to clothing to genetically evolved open source 3D chip designs, will be built bottom-up for the same lowcost as growing a potatoe.

--

Well, we still have "cheaper" and "more"

[carcosa30]

Even if there were no way to manufacture chips smaller/faster than the ones we have today, there are always going to be refinements in the manufacturing process, making chips cheaper and cheaper. There are always supercomputers. Perhaps, also, we could find a way to really minimize waste heat, allowing many CPUs per board.

It's also possible that DNA computation and other kinds of biocomputing are going to come along. These have the advantage of being gigantically parallel; they would possibly be good for tasks that are not latency sensitive but require immense brute force.

I'm satisfied that we have enough axes of advance to keep progress moving forward. Remember, computers have only been around for a very short while; I refuse to believe that we hit on the fitness maximum on the first try; there have to be technologies out there that are far faster/cooler/smaller.

So What?

[Tyler Eaves]

Once we approach the phyisical limits, we can simply expand in a different way. Just start adding CPU cores to the machine. SMP boxes are becoming fairly common already, even the in the PC market, and I definatly see that trend continuing. Once things get cheap enough, why not stick 16 or 32 chips in a machine? Heat and power issues can be minimized by greatly UNDERclocking the chips. In another few years, chips will be at insane frequecys, and instead of pushing them the limit by running that at super high power levels, just back things off a bit.

Re:So What?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the real problem, the rate they're going at we'll have run out of electrons completely by 2018. We'll have to start using positrons instead.

Funny ...

[s20451]

I remember sitting in a lecture in 1997, where some luminary from IBM predicted the death of Moore's Law in 10 years. Now it's 2003 and the death of Moore's Law is being predicted in 15 years.

Technologically, there will probably be enough clever ideas to take chip manufacturing beyond the point where it is no longer economical to make such fast processors. Consider that in 1980, a handful of engineers could sit down with pencil and paper and design a microprocessor. Today it takes teams of PhDs in physics, math, and engineering to do the same, in multi-billion-dollar facilities with the latest design tools and techniques. One day the buying public will realise that e-mail and word processing does not need a bazillion gigahertz, and gamers will have photorealistic animation with excellent AI. The chip maker will not make back the investment on a fab plant, and on that day Moore's Law will be dead, not for physical reasons but for economical ones.

Re:Funny ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, however, it takes my 3GHz Xenon
based PC with 1Gb of ram about the same
time to boot as it did my 100MHz Pentium
Pro with 32Mb of Ram from 1995.

What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.

Re:Funny ...

[femto]

Note:

1GB/3GHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz

32MB/100MHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz

Basically, as processors have gotten faster, the resources attached to the processor have gotten correspondingly larger. Thus it takes more clock cycles to initialise these resources and get them ready for use (ie. 'boot' them). The end result is boot times will be approximately constant (as observed).

By way of comparison, my first computer had 6kB of RAM and a 3.6MHz processor. 6kB/3.6MHz = 0.002. As one would expect, this computer booted in milliseconds!

Re:Moore's law is about to hit the wall

[Draveed]

Perhaps Intel could hold off on the 10 ghz chips and concentrate on making some that don't get so damn hot.

Moore's Law is Obsolete

[use_compress]

Because Less' Law has just been developed. Of course, Moore's Law made Kat's Law obsolete.

Can anyone say paradigm shift?

[Michael Crutcher]

Electronics have already gone through five paradigms:

• electomechanical calculators
• relay based computers
• vacuum tubes
• discrete transistors
• integrated circuits

Moore's law will continue, but it will continue based upon a new paradigm that sweeps in and seems to "miraculously" preserve Moore's law. The obvious next step is three dimensional integrated circuits and there is already research in exactly that direction: Intel's 3d gates. AMD is also in the game. When 3d transistors lose steam some new paradigm will take its place.

mcc's law

[mcc]

The number of papers publicly published proclaiming the "real soon now" end of Moore's law will double every 18 months.

Re:mcc's law

[Kris_J]

Kris_J's corollary: The frequency of stories on Slashdot about the end of Moore's Law will double every 18 months, as will the number of posts attached to each story that call for an end to said coverage.

Re:mcc's law

[IthnkImParanoid]

IthnkImParanoid's law: As a discussion of Moore's law procedes over time, the probability of someone naming a law after themself approaches one. At that time, rational discussion becomes impossible as people flood the thread with their own laws.

The presumption

[Hartley1]

to predict technologies and processes 20+ years down the road is beyondd amusing. You cannot predict breakthroughs and discoveries.

3-D

[G4from128k]

Moore's actual Law does not require ever-shrinking transistors. It only requires that we put more of them into each chip. Double-sides chips, multi-die packaging, or 3-D layering of circuits would help increase the number of transistors in each "chip." You may think that multi-die chips is a cheat, but when it comes to packing in several billion transistors into a CPU, who cares how they do it.

For those who do not know

[Ridgelift]

Most of you know this, so please just bear with the sermon for those who do not.

Moore's Law is a marketing term which was coined by the press, not Gordon Moore himself. It's not a law in the scientific sense, like the Law of Gravity. The 'law' simply states that the number of transistors on IC's roughly doubles every 18 months. People have been predicting the death of Moore's Law for many years, and probably will for many more.

If it truly were a law, it could not die. But eventually it will fail. In the mean time, it's a 'law' that keeps sales and marketing people busy, ensuring there will always be faster processors to run the latest bloatware.

Electron tunnelling visualization

[Uma Thurman]

This is how you visualize an electron tunnelling across a gate:

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that we can't know an electron's position accurately. There's always a little bit of uncertainty about where it is. So, imagine the position of an electron not as a point, but as a little 'O'. That circle is the area that the electron could be. At any time it could be in any random place in that circle.

Now, if the 'O' is centered on the edge of one side of the gap, and the gap is bigger than the circle radius, then the electron has zero probability of crossing the gap. But, once the gap is smaller than the radius of the circle, then you've got parts of both sides of the gate within the area of the circle. Since the electron can appear randomly anywhere inside the circle, that means that sometime that electron will appear on the other side of the gate. As the gates get smaller, the probability that the electron will randomly appear on the other side of the gate goes up, until so many electrons are crossing the gate that we can't tell if the thing is on or off.

Re:Moore's law is about to hit the wall

[LoveTheIRS]

4 and 10 Ghz is a huge jump. I doubt Intel would release them that close together. It would be horrible marketing sense. Why make such a big bang jump to 4 and 10 when Intel can suck much more money producing a 4 Ghz then a 5 Ghz and the 6 and so on. Indeed I am questioning your source, but time will tell if you are correct about these releases. As far as Moore's law: In the past when people have said Moore's law must stop it was because researchers were having harder and harder times finding ways to product smaller chips. Now we are getting close to the point that we are arranging the silicon semiconductors atom by atom. Once your organizing atoms you physically cannot do much more. You cannot work with smaller components than on an atom by atom basis. Researchers have trouble even isolating the constituent parts of an atom, and the components of an atom are still highly theoretical. And those components that have been identified are highly unstable. Supposedly though there is something called quantum computing. I don't understand it but maybe quantum computing which doesn't use transistors (as far as I know) will be the future.

So...

[splaytree]

Does this mean in 2018 I can put my cat Schrodinger and a vial of hydrocyanic acid in my PC and watch the sparks fly?

Ok, Ill say it...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Diamonds are a boy's best friend!

"Do you have a nerd or geek in your life? show him how much you love him by purchasing a intel diamond wedding processor(tm). A processor is forever."

"Introducing, the new intel pentium 9, the Bling Bling Ice(tm), available in both yellow and white gold settings!"

I for one, welcome our....oh, wrong tired, over used tagline....

HALtheComputer's Law

[Hal The Computer]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you HALtheCompuer's's Law:

This law states laws that govern new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.

Sorry, your law is already out of date. The march of progress and all that. Don't feel bad; they replaced me with a new HAL in 2010.

Again and Again and Again and that's just Slashdot

[Maddog Batty]

Mores law is coming to an end...
Jan 2003 Dec 2002 Oct 1999

Oh no its not...
Feb 2003 Sept 2002

Re:The real barrier - what about 20nm

[SB9876]

Uh, the feature size of the ship has absolutely nothing to do with the radiation coming out of it. Your monitor releases X-rays (mostly blocked by the lead they put in the CRT glass) because of Brehmstrahlung (sp?) radiation from the interaction of high energy electrons with the inside of the CRT. The same process is used in an X-ray machine at the doctor's office w/o shielding.
What you'll get is radio frequency emissions with the same frequency as the clock speed of the CPU. At a THz, your emissions are in the microwave band which will be nicely contained by the case. (although it might give a whole new meaning to the ability to cook an egg on a CPU) A very rough calculation I just did in gives ~300-500 THz as the clock speed recquired to even emit visible light.

No need to pull out the lead apron or tinfoil hats just yet.

Re:The future is now!

[Hoser McMoose]

but we are already switching the fuel technology backbone to Hydrogen

Hehe, I always get a kick out of it when people start talking about our new "hydrogen based society" or some other garbage like that. It's incredible how many people seem to believe that you can generate power from hydrogen! Of course, anyone with an once of scientific knowledge can tell you, unless you're talking about nuclear fussion, than hydrogen is simply an energy carrier and not an energy source. You don't pick hydrogen off the magic hydrogen tree, you don't mine hydrogen from the ground and it definitely doesn't just materialize. You put energy into water, you get hydrogen and oxygen. You combine the two back together again at a later date and you get most (but not all) of the energy back. Long story short, you've basically made a cell (aka a "battery" in commonspeak). It's no coincedence that we call these things "fuel cells".

There may be ways to break down hydrocarbons cleanly, efficiently and *cheaply*, thus providing another source of hydrogen where you can get more energy out than you have to put in, but guess where those hydrocarbons come from? If you said, oil, you win the prize!

In any case, in a vain attempt to bring this back on-topic, nanotubes and the like do provide some interesting new long-term possibilities for producing ICs, but they are definitely not without their own set of constraints. No matter how you slice it, sooner or later you run into a minimum size. At some point in time you just don't have enough atoms left to keep your electrons where you would expect them to be. There's lots that can be done in new and different ways to help push these problems further back, but no matter what technology you chose you eventually hit the same sorts of limitations.

Long story short, don't hold your breath for nanotechnology to revolutionize ICs, and definitely don't hold your breath for a society "powered by hydrogen"!