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Moore's Law Staying Strong Through 30nm
jeffsenter writes "The NYTimes has the story on IBM with JSR Micro advancing photolithograhy research to allow 30nm chips. Good news for Intel, AMD, Moore's Law and overclockers. The IBM researchers' technology advance allows for the same deep ultraviolet rays used to make chips today to be used at 30nm. Intel's newest CPUs are manufactured at 65nm and present technology tapped out soon after that. This buys Moore's Law a few more years."
At what point does BUSS technology break down? Figured this was where to ask.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I am too lazy to learn these things from scratch but would anyone cared to tell us what's the theoretical minimum width we can go before eletrons starts jumping wires? I hope it's not 5nm.
"This buys Moore's Law a few more years."
I've heard that more than a few times.Isn't that why it's a law? It seems like every 18 months or so, Moore ends up almost petering out (kind of like apple...) and there ends up being a redeeming breakthrough that keeps it around.
If it wasn't a law, we'd just call it Moore's hypothesis, or Moore's pittiful attempt at justifying an upgrade. I remember the day when 50Mhz was the theoretical limit for speed and then they got the grand idea of putting a heat sink on the chip.
--pete
since RIT has been doing 26nm. http://www.physorg.com/news10755.html
I believe Moore's Law (or, rather, the modified version about processor speed rather than transitor count) will transition to a new regime soon - that of "average" exponential improvement in the form of a punctuated near-equilibrium.
I believe that the chip industry will have to shift paradigms as the limit of a technology approaches and during these shifts there will be a period of relative nonimprovement as new techniques are refined, implemented, and large scale facilities are built.
There's so many promising technologies on the horizon (photonic computing, three dimensional "chips," quantum computation) etc, but the transition to each will be very bumpy, not at all smooth like the last 40 years of refining two-dimensional semiconductors.
As times change, what we know as Moore's law will change with it. It's likely that the "average" improvement will continue to follow the law more or less (considering that it is driven more heavily by economics than technology). Computers will continue to get faster, cheaper, and able to do things we wouldn't have thought we needed to do before.
So your computer will be nice and fast, just not any of your applications...
Z.
While the smallest chunk of silicon we could lay down would be one atom of it, there are things far smaller. In fact you can go something like 26 more levels of magnitude smaller before you start reaching the feasable limit of measurable existance. And yes, subatomic particles could theoretically be used in processors.
The process designation refers to the the distance between the source and drain in the FETs (transistors) on a processor. Keep in mind that this distance is by no means the smallest thing in the processor - the actual gate oxide layer is tiny by comparison, with Intel's 65nm process having only 1.2nm of the stuff. That's less than 11 atoms thick.
Found this on a thread at bit-tech.net forums.
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
You can trust me on this. I have access to that interweb thing.
I've heard the predictions for the end of Moore's Law, but haven't paid attention to the reasoning behind them. Is there some (sub)atomic barrier that is supposed to cause this? I was curious if further technological breakthroughs wouldn't prove these predictions incorrect. What would the predictions have been 20 or 30 years ago for our current tech? I doubt few, if any, were able to guess correctly.
Just another day in Paradise
All this means is that AMD and Intel have to license the technology from a competitor. That's hardly good news for them, and it probably means higher CPU prices for us.
This isn't good news at all.
There's several large cans of whup-ass that have to be overcome before you can make IC's that much smaller:
And the programmers will just soak up all your extra speed by turning up the "ooooh" factor (See: Vista).
What happens when they get to -1 nm then? Can they keep going smaller?
sPh
Moore's law is about the number of transistors on a chip. It states nothing at all about speed.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
"Moore's law" is not a law of nature, it is a marketing strategy of Intel.
Well, if the gate layer is the smallest thing in the transistor and it is 11 atoms wide and 1 atom is the smallest measure, then smallest transistor theortically possible is 65nm/11 = 6nm
You are confusing dimensions. When intel refers to 65nm processes, they are talking about length and width ability to carve out features. Oxide layers "thickness" operates in the third dimension ("height"?) to provide resitant layers. It is much smaller then 65nm. Actual atoms are about 200 picometers in "width".
From:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+Forty+years+of+Moores+Law
This is not about mhz ratings, though for a while these were doubling along the same rate as transistors per square inch were. Moore's comments were about integrated circuit "complexity" minimum component costs, which, if you are talking about transistors, has remained reasonable accurate. If you are talking about mhz per dollar, then you're going to find this is not accurate at all.
Long story short, if you had a 2 ghz machine in early 2003 and you're wondering why you aren't on an 8 ghz machine now, it's because mhz ratings have NOTHING to do with Moore's Law. Which is why I suggest referring to the Wiki entry on it.
Also important is Kryder's Law for HD storage capacity. Within a decade or two we may be able to store all creative works ever created on one drive.
Case in point: Hard drives increase a thousand-fold in storage space every 10.5 years. In 1996 I purchased a Compaq computer with a 1 gig drive. That was an insane amount of space at the time, but now, 10 years later, it looks like I may be able to purchase my first TB drive soon.
If you are simply talking about Moore's Law in terms of processing power, there are other places to gain improvements rather than just compactness of chips. There is also parallel processing technology, which is still steadily improving.
There are many important algorithmic problems that are inherently serial. Some things are mathematically impossible to parallelize. Also limitations caused by enforcing cache coherency, communications interconnects, and resource access synchronization/serialization create bottlenecks in parallel systems. The astrophysics simulation code that I paralellized is almost entirely math operations on large arrays (PDE solving), however there are diminishing returns past 48 processors due to communications latency. Better programming techniques can push the limit of this, however it is difficult to design software that mitigates the effects of this kind of latency without many man-hours spent to handle it.
Then, far off over the horizon, there's the possibility of quantum computing, which would make for a rediculously huge surge in processing power all at once.
I mentioned this in my post, however there is a bit of a catch. Quantum computing, practically speaking, is only useful for certain problems - problems that are "embarassingly parallel." QC does not help with fundamentally serial problems, and is likely to be impractical beyond a critical number of qubits, due to quantum incoherency, even quantum error correction can only stretch so far. Great for cryptography/number theoretic operations, and probably many optimization problems (scheduling perhaps?) but certainly not for standard computation. Problems (like database queries) that require large amounts of data to be stored in a quantum coherent fashion are unlikely to be practical.
"That's fundamentally how Moore's Law works: as soon as the current paradigm starts to get maxed out, we simply shift to another paradigm."
Ahh, but that's just it - there is a cost to the switch in terms of both time and money. What I am saying is that yes, we can continue to change paradigms whenever we hit a limit, however these transitions will be very expensive and will cause "delays" during which little improvment on shipping computer technology will be seen.
Now the problem here is that software seems to be getting less efficient. Even with faster processors, checking your email, web browsing and word processing now takes a lot more RAM than it used to. If software was getting more efficient, or at least holding to the same level, we'd be a lot farther ahead now.
While this question will undoubtedly reveal my limited understanding of computer engineering, I will ask it anyway... Why is the industry obsessed with getting smaller chips? There's plenty of room on my desktop for a hefty five-inch or even ten-inch diameter chip if it meant greater processing power and/or speed. Is the reason that they shoot for smaller chips that by making the chip smaller and smaller, it can run more calculations per second just in virtue of the speed of the electrons through the circuitry? Even so, I hear about people joining processors together to increase speed/power... so why not shoot for utilizing older technology to create larger yet better chips?
----
"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
Actually the more interesting thing about Moore's law (in terms of total processing power) is that it holds way further back than most people think. Mechanical calulator's total numbers and performance (like Charles Babage's difference engine) were also in accordance with Moore's law, and the two curves fit together quite nicely with the advent of the "many women" approach to computing and electronical computers. Even clock-making reflects Moore's law in the last hundreds of years - in terms of unit numbers, clock sizes, element sizes (the size of the gears), the switch to electronic watches, etc..
...for the same reasons we call it Murphy's law. The world would be a pretty terrible place if absolutely everything that could ever possibly go wrong, did. In both cases it's just a perception that things behave in a law-like manner even though there's obviously no scientific basis and with plenty of counterexamples. As far as technology predictions goes, it is disturbingly accurate, it follows a mathematical formula as most laws do... so we call it a law. It's a joke, laugh.
And the rub of it is exactly what you say - it seems to just keep going and going, despite its obvious unsustainability. My dad used an osciloscope on single bits in radio tubes, can you imagine what they said in the 60s? 70s? 80s? 90s? "This can't go on". Moore's law seemed (seems?) to stand above the laws of nature. That's what makes it so intriguing. But it has far more to do with social science than natural science...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Some things are mathematically impossible to parallelize. Also limitations caused by enforcing cache coherency, communications interconnects, and resource access synchronization/serialization create bottlenecks in parallel systems.
Explain the human mind, then.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The Electrons in your transistors are "blurry". When the walls of their potential wells (i.e. the width of the wires) get to low, they will start to tunnel between them in a number that is inacceptable for the operation of a logical circuit. Note that tunneling probability is proportional to something like e to minus the potential well height, so there is no critical limit, rather a smooth transition from "no problem" to "show-stopper".
So the real question here, which is left to the audience, is at what width do we get a real problem with tunneling currents. (I assume that on contemporary CPUs, the effect is already measurable, yet correctable).
Shouldnt it be Moore's Theory, or Moore's Observation?
:)
Yeah, Moore or less
IBM didn't invent anything new here. Rather, they proved that photolithography--the same technology used to build chips for decades--will continue to yield faster chips for the foreseeable future. In other words, silicon hasn't "hit the wall" just yet.
IBM Microelectronics doesn't have a monopoly over photolithography. They couldn't get a patent if they tried--there's prior art going back about half a century. In other words, it's good news for IBM, Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Micron, Freescale, Agere, Samsung, Fujitsu, and anyone else building chips.
But feel free to wave the POWER flag if you like. It's a nice architecture.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Simple. The amazing things that the human brain is capable of doing are parallelizable. Things like recognizing the shape of letters or phonemes in speech are definitely parallelizable tasks.
Try doing something that isn't parallelizable, like modular exponentiation of a 2048-bit number, in the human brain. It goes very slowly.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Moore's law does not specify the density or even number of transistors on an integrated circuit, as many mistakenly assume; it merely states that integrated circuits double in complexity vs. cost to manufacture every 18 months. In fact, new manufacturing techniques alone, which lower the cost to manufacture can satisfy the law.
Moore's law will probably continue after quantum well transistors are implemented and minituarized. The Cell architecture and push for multi-core processors lend themselves well to Moore's law as well. I would wager designing 4-8 core CPUs, multi-core CPUs with shared caches and the new AMD chips that integrate the memory controller rather than using a Northbridge easily satisfy Moore's law.