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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."
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:
Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:
Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!
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??
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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The number of papers publicly published proclaiming the "real soon now" end of Moore's law will double every 18 months.
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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.
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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.