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Moore's Law Staying Strong Through 30nm

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there's-plenty-of-room-at-the-bottom dept.

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."

4 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Glad to see IBM catching up... by merced317 · · Score: 5, Informative

    since RIT has been doing 26nm. http://www.physorg.com/news10755.html

  2. Re:What's the minimum then? by PoconoPCDoctor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. Yardsticks? I got yer yardstick. by Quiet_Desperation · · Score: 5, Funny
    As capacity increases, new yardsticks are required. Eventually it'll go from number of songs to hours of porn, then hours of HD porn, then hours of full sensory VR porn experience, hours of holodeck recording and finally number of downloaded human personality matrices... of porn stars.

    You can trust me on this. I have access to that interweb thing.

  4. Re:I've heard that one before... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Informative
    Isn't that why it's a law?

    It's not a law. It's just incorrectly called a law.

    It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.