The Death of the Silicon Computer Chip

Stony Stevenson sends a report from the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics conference, where researchers predicted that the reign of the silicon chip is nearly over. Nanotubes and superconductors are leading candidates for a replacement; they don't mention graphene. "...the conventional silicon chip has no longer than four years left to run... [R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years. Just as Gordon Moore predicted in 2005, physical limitations of the miniaturized electronic devices of today will eventually lead to silicon chips that are saturated with transistors and incapable of holding any more digital information. The challenge now lies in finding alternative components that may pave the way to faster, more powerful computers of the future"

Comments

I'll...

[PachmanP]

...believe it when I see it!

Re:I'll...

[scubamage]

I agree. We have the methods to use other material, but silicon is plentiful and VERY cheap. Like, the majority of the earth's composition cheap. Grab a handful of dirt ANYWHERE and a large portion will be silicon. Even if it gets replaced for certain high end hardware, I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

Re:I'll...

[CRCulver]

It's not as if carbon is scarce either.

Re:I'll...

[ScrewMaster]

I doubt silicon will be going anywhere anytime soon - its simply too affordable.

Yes, and we're so damned good at manipulating it. All this newfangled stuff is pie-in-the-sky at this point. Yes, I suppose we'll eventually replace it for the likes of high-end processors, as you say, but everything else out of silicon for a long time to come.

People keep bring up Moore's Law, as if it's some immutable law of physics. The reality is that we've invested trillions of {insert favorite monetary unit here} in silicon-based tech. Each new generation of high-speed silicon costs more, so that's a lot of inertia. Furthermore, if Guilder's Rule holds true in this case (and I see no reason why it shouldn't) any technology that comes long to replace silicon will have to be substantially better. Otherwise, the costs of switching won't make it economically viable.

Re:I'll...

[petermgreen]

I'm pretty sure the cost of the raw material is a negliable part of the costs of making semiconductor grade silicon. Most of the costs are in the very energy intensive purfification processes.

The real advantage of silicon for many years was that SiO2 was/is a decent gate materal for mosfets and insulator for insulating the metal from the main body of the IC and could be grown easilly on the surface of silicon. But afaict this advantage has dwindled as we need CVD deposited insulators for insulating between multiple metal layers anyway and as processes have got smaller there is a push to switch to other gate materials for better performance.

The main advantage of silicon right now is probablly just that we are very used to it and know what does and doesn't work with it. Other semiconductors are more of an unknown.

Even if silicon gets displaced from things like the desktop/server CPU market though I suspect it will stick arround in lower performance chips.

Re:I'll...

[gyranthir]

The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.

Re:I'll...

[twistedsymphony]

The issue of Carbon is the cost, scalability, accuracy, and timeliness/speed of nanotube production. Not the resource itself.

What's that quote? "Necessity is the mother of Invention." or something along those lines.

Silicone was expensive to refine and manufacture at one point too. Like all new technologies the REAL cost is the in manufacturing and the cost goes down once we've manufactured enough of it to refine the process until we know the cheapest and quickest ways to do it.

Re:I'll...

[gyranthir]

That may be true, but that isn't going to change in 4 years. The replacement ideas have been around for a good while now and still productions, repetition, and scalability are still very not cost effective or scalable to even minimal production needs. And not to nitpick it's Silicon, not cone.

Re:I'll...

[maxume]

Those are all issues with silicon as well(crystals vs nanotubes...), they are just reasonably well solved.

Re:I'll...

[maddriller]

It is sort of silly to declare the end of life for one technology when the technology to replace it is not yet in place. Every year for the last twenty people have proclaimed the end of silicon's reign, yet we still use silicon. The is a huge investment in the existing silicon infrastructure that will have to be duplicated in any replacement technology. There is also the educational inertia - engineering schools are still teaching people to use silicon and it will be many years before they start teaching anything else. Silicon will be around for a long time to come.

Re:I'll...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nitpicking? I hope you're being sarcastic. :) If you had pointed out grammatical errors, that might be nitpicking. But a person is pretty far into "STFU" territory when they presume to say something meaningful about the element silicon and confuse it with silicone.

Re:I'll...

[suggsjc]

I mean, you don't need a 1thz processor for a car's ECU, or for a garage door opener.

absolutely positively undeniably 100% wrong

Just because your garage door opener can't "solve" Folding@Home doesn't mean that we can't dream. I mean, at some point we truly need to be able to say something like "well my garage door opener has more processing power than BlueGene/L did in 2008"

Seriously, get over yourself and your "reality"

Re:I'll...

[Wavebreak]

The smaller your manufacturing process gets, the smaller a defect has to be to ruin a chip. Increasing chip sizes would get you a higher percentage of defective chips on a single wafer. Also, the kind of purity the processes need is hard to get, so silicon real estate is fairly expensive. Thus, bigger chips mean higher costs from two different sources, adds up pretty fast. Might be talking out of my ass here, but that's how I've understood it.

Let them speculate ...

[ScrewMaster]

[R]esearchers speculate that the silicon chip will be unable to sustain the same pace of increase in computing power and speed as it has in previous years.

In the meantime, other researchers will figure out ways to make silicon work smarter, not harder.

Much sillio articulo

[Ancient_Hacker]

Let's think, a technology that has taken 60 years to go from lab to today's level, it's going to be superseded in five years by technology that has not yet made a single transistor or gate. Hmmmm..... Meanwhile silicon is not going to be improved in any obvious way, such as with ballistic-transistors, gallium-arsenide, silicon-carbide, 3-d geometries, process shrinkage, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.... No soup for you.

Not every chip needs speed

[Enleth]

I don't know any numbers, but I think I can safely guess that the computer processor business is just a fraction of the whole silicon chip manufacturing business - maybe not a small fraction, but still. And the rest of the industry doesn't need extreme speeds - there are microcontrollers, integrated buffers, logic gates, comparators, operational amplifiers and loads of other $0.05 crap you got in your toaster oven, blender, wirst watch, remote-controlled toy car, printer, Hi-Fi, etc., etc. And there is an obvious priority for those: cheap and reliable. So the silicon is not going anywhere.

Re:Not every chip needs speed

[MttJocy]

Exactly if silicon is going to be phased out anywhere in 4 year (note the IF) it will be in extremely high end supercomputer type devices perhaps a decade or so later this might get enough research combined with economies of scale to hit the high end PC market, maybe another decade may go by and the development dollars earned from this will enable them to enter the price range of the rest of the PC market (note here at this point you will most likely have a motherboard with silicon chips with exception only of the CPU and possibly the GPU for high end gaming machines) even probably 50 years later your digital wristwatch will still be silicon it does not need more.

Simply, silicon may begin to find competitors in the high end market for people with deep pockets but it will not die out in lower end devices for decades yet if ever (we need to come up with some very novel ideas before your wristwatch needs tens of gigahertz of processing power).

Re:Not again

[esocid]

Yeah, agree with you there. The article said they will be replaced within 4 years...yeah right. Maybe in 10 years something will come out that may be faster, but marginally more expensive. I don't see silicon exiting the technology world altogether within even the next 50 years. Some parts may be replaced but Si chips will still be kicking.

Birth vs. Death

[192939495969798999]

This guy is confused. The BIRTH of the silicon chip is nearly over... now is when it will completely take over our environments. To put it another way: demand for silicon chips is as dead as demand for crude oil, corn, or other staples.

ECHO! Echo! echo!

[Chas]

This has been getting bandied about every time someone comes up with a new, spiff-tastic technology/material to build an IC out of.

"THIS COULD REPLACE SILICON! WOOT!"

Yet it keeps NOT happening. Again, and again (and again).

The trailblazers keep forgetting, the silicon infrastructure has a LOT more money to play with than a given exotic materials research project. And, in many cases, what's being worked on in exotics can be at least partially translated back to silicon, yielding further improvements that keep silicon ahead of the curve in the price/performance ratio. Additionally, we keep getting better at manufacturing exotic forms of silicon too.

So, until silicon comes to a real deal-breaker problem that nobody can work their way around, I SERIOUSLY doubt that silicon IC is going anywhere. Especially not for a technology that has taken several years, and recockulous amounts of money simply to get a single flawless chip in a lab.

Not so fast...

[jandersen]

The transistor was first patented in 1925 (look it up in Wikipedia) and the integrated circuit in 1949 - both fundamental for microchips - but we still use radio valves today, and not just for nostaligic reasons. Silicon will probably hang around for a long time to come, I think.

For something else to replace silicon it will have to not only be better, but so much better that it will justify the investment, or it will have to offer other, significant benefits, like being cheaper to produce, using less power or being smaller. Of these, I think speed is probably the least important, at least for common consumers.

Personally, I still haven't reached the point where my 3 year-old machine is too small or slow - not even near. It wouldn't make sense to upgrade, simply. I think most people see it that way, they would probably be more interested in gadgets than in a near-super computer.

Four years, eh? Then what?

[swordgeek]

Even if the hard limits of silicon circuits are reached in four years, we will NOT be switching to nanotubes, graphene, superconductors, or quantum computing. Any of those technologies are at least a decade away from commercial applications, and 15 years is more likely. If there's nowhere to advance after four more years (and I rather doubt that--we've got too much history proving us wrong), then we'll just grow out. Bigger silicon dies, bigger cache, more cores. Maybe we'll actually hit the terminus of Moore's law, but that won't stop computers from advancing, and it won't magically make any of the alternative technologies mature.

When someone makes a nanotube 80486 that I can buy and use, THEN I'll start to believe we're close to a technology shift. Hell, give me a 4004 - at least it's a product.

Bottom line: We're not there yet.

Only half of the story.

[IorDMUX]

Some very intelligent researchers at the Institute of Physics' Condensed Matter and Material Physics Conference came to some very intelligent decisions about the future of CPU's... but this is hardly the end of the silicon chip.

In addition to some of the points made by other posters (Silicon CPU's will live on in smart systems, cheap systems, handheld systems, etc.), there is a whole world of silicon chips that are *not* CPU's! Analog and mixed signal circuits need highly linear devices--not just switches that turn on and off--which current silicon technology provides wonderfully. Our current analog design technology has nowhere near exhausted the possibilities on the tapestry that ten/twenty year old silicon fabrication technologies provide.

Maybe graphene, nanotubes, or the Next Big Thing will change the high performance CPU niche, but silicon still provides everything we can manage to use for the rest of the IC world.

Besides, I bet that graffiti will be quite a challenge with nanotubes.