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.

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.

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.