Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Death of the Silicon Computer Chip

Posted by kdawson on from the aye-and-it-had-a-good-run dept.

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"

8 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. I'll... by PachmanP · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...believe it when I see it!

    --
    You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
    1. Re:I'll... by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's not as if carbon is scarce either.

    2. Re:I'll... by iamhassi · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

      Agreed. Besides, they've been saying this since the 90s, that silicon can't possibly get any faster and it'll be replaced very soon.

      I call BS. They had 350 gigahertz silicon chips 2 years ago:
      "At room temperature, the IBM-Georgia Tech chip operates at 350GHz, or 350 billion cycles per second. That's far faster than standard PC processors today, which range from 3.8GHz to 1.8GHz. But SiGe chips can gain additional performance in colder temperatures....SiGe chips, the scientists theorized, could eventually hit 1 terahertz, or 1 trillion cycles a second."

      I think silicon is safe for awhile longer.

      --
      my karma will be here long after I'm gone
    3. Re:I'll... by Beetle+B. · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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. Cost is not the main problem with nanotubes.

      Nanotubes have a certain chirality - denoted by (m,n) with m and n being integers. Those two numbers define the properties of the nanotube (e.g. if m-n is a multiple of 3, the nanotube is metallic - otherwise it is semiconducting). They also determine the radius.

      So far no one has come up with a way to get a nanotube of a certain chirality. They just synthesize many nanotubes and then pick manually the ones they want - if it exists in the sample. Until they can do this, the nanotube industry will not become a reality.
      --
      Beetle B.
  2. Let them speculate ... by ScrewMaster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    [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.

    --
    The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
  3. Not again by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been hearing this claim every few years for the last 25. Remember optical computers in the mid-80s? How about gallium arsenide? CRAY-3 anyone?

    And of course what's really reaching a limit is not the CPU's, but our ability to use them effectively. See "TRIPS architecture" on the wiki as an example end-run around the problem that offers hundred-times improvements using existing fabs.

    Maury

  4. Much sillio articulo by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Unlikely by aneviltrend · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intel's CTO Justin Rattner just gave a talk at Cornell two days ago; he covered this topic carefully and confirmed that Intel has the technology and plans to carry out Moore's Law for another 10 years on silicon. Technologies such as SOI and optical interconnects will be leveraged to hit this.

    It's not necessarily the size of the transistors that make chips hard to make these days either (although they are now giving us huge problems with leakage current). It's harder to route the metal between these transistors than it is to pack them onto the silicon. New processors from Intel and AMD have areas with low transistor density just because it was impossible to route the large metal interconnects between them. Before we can take advantage of even smaller transistors we'll need a way for higher interconnect density.