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Opportunities From the Twilight of Moore's Law
saccade.com writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit. Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"
There are theoretical limitations to how small things can get, and how much work can be done per unit of space, but we're nowhere near that yet.
The author claims that semiconductor density improvements have been slowing over the past few years, but that's not true at all. One need only look at past schedule of Intel's die shrinks, or their transistor counts, to realize that we're still going ahead at full steam. The pace of reductions has held pretty much constant to Moore's law for at least the past decade, and Intel's roadmaps seem to show that continuing for at least another two die shrinks (which will each double density).
It's kind of amazing, when you think of it. Comparing the best of 2002 to 2012, you get from 90nm to 22nm. In just one decade, that is a 16.7x increase in density, and that doesn't even take architectural improvements into account.