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Transistors Will Stop Shrinking in 2021, Moore's Law Roadmap Predicts (ieee.org)
Moore's Law, an empirical observation of the number of components that could be built on an integrated circuit and their corresponding cost, has largely held strong for more than 50 years, but its days are really numbered now. The prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was only officially made available this month, says that transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. From an article on IEEE: After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another. These roadmapping shifts may seem like trivial administrative changes. But "this is a major disruption, or earthquake, in the industry," says analyst Dan Hutcheson, of the firm VLSI Research. U.S. semiconductor companies had reason to cooperate and identify common needs in the early 1990s, at the outset of the roadmapping effort that eventually led to the ITRS's creation in 1998. Suppliers had a hard time identifying what the semiconductor companies needed, he says, and it made sense for chip companies to collectively set priorities to make the most of limited R&D funding.It still might not be the end of Moore's remarkable observation, though. The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density. The original report published by ITRS is here.
You have to wonder just how its adherents will start adjusting the scenario now. Should be like watching preachers recalculate the date of the rapture.
We hear the same bullshit every 2 years. Moore's law has nothing to do with the SIZE of the transitors. It has to do with the number of transistors on the chip and, to a lesser extent, the density of the transistors. Arranging the transistors vertically and horizontally will allow the law to continue.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
transistor could stop shrinking in just five years
Thanks, Hillary.
Is there anything she and Obama won't do to harm progress?
Trump 2016!
Wasn't there an article here a few days ago about some single atom (or molecule) transistors already tested?
Moore's law will stop when a switching device becomes a single molecule. Make no mistake that it means for Moore's law to continue it means a radical change in the materials and design of switching devices. Notice I didn't say "transistor." Transistor density is becoming an issue. There are fundamental problems like electron tunneling that can only be fixed by tweaks like voltage for so long.
The next move is going to have to start moving towards molecular electronics. Thankfully nature has been working on some designs we can use for a few billion years.
But she disagreed.
I told her it was cold.
But she disagreed.
I cited Moore.
But she laughed.
At what, I'm not sure.
Burma Shave.
Admitted, I'm just another guy debating a topic I don't know much about, but won't layering components on top of each other result in massive heating issues? I mean, the heat from each layer has to go somewhere, right? Does anyone with more knowledge in this field care to comment?
just like the Y2K problem, so everyone thinks the planet is going to come to a sudden end. Or not.
#MooresLawMatters
Just stop. Stop!
The author is the son-half of a father/son duo, Dan and Jerry Hutcheson, that wrote an article for Scientific American in 1996 on the expected coming end of Moore's Law, say around 2003-2005. It was one of the many that Intel liked to deride as they pushed on down below the wavelength of high-ultraviolet light in their form factors, a remarkable achievement.
And no doubt, Hutcheson will be in for more mocking about how Moore's will continue until we're using subatomic particles.
But for me, Moore's ended around the 2003-2005 they predicted. My big IT interest isn't phones and low-power computing, where Moore's is continuing - yes, possibly for longer than Hutcheson predicts -- but in raw desktop performance at number-crunching big databases. There's been progress there since 2005, but most of it has come from faster memory, SSDs, more cores. Raw horsepower progress continued, even exponentially - but not at a 2-year doubling after about 2005, it was more like 3, 4, then 5 years. I should have titled this, "Moore's law has been winding down for a decade, for many".
The new "Skylake" generation of i7's is mostly about low-power progress. A genuine jump for us power users is coming in the fall, I think, after a couple of years since the last one...and the chips should be 15% or 20% faster than 2014's. Just not like the late 90s and doublings every year or two.
Atoms are just a theory, after all. We'll use quarks. We'll never make software more compact and efficient though.
Yeah, there used to be faster transistors, cheaper transistors, and lower power transistors from scaling. The speed increase slowed down around 90 nm (remember Pentium 4?). And a few years ago, nvidia had some leaked slides complaining about less reduction in transistor cost. However, mobile is a big market, and power consumption is important there, so I guess cell phone customers will pay for continued transistor shrinks.
Transistors will stop shrinking when they reach the smallest size possible for an electron to move from one side to the next. This will be one atom thick by 1 atom high for the emitter and collector, but I'm not sure what the base would require. Maybe two or three atoms to be able to control the flow? This is for digital transistors only, analog may need be much larger due to frequencies, polarity, rate of flow and all that rigmarole.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
The number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.
foo mane padme hum
"This image covers the basic features of 3D Xpoint. The new memory is designed to be non-volatile, stackable (to improve density), and can perform read/write operations without requiring a transistor (DRAM requires one transistor per cell, which is one reason why it draws much more power per GB than a NAND flash drive)." ----
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Maybe transistors can't get smaller, but you don't have to use transistors. 3DXPoint is not as fast as DRAM but it is still so fast that it can replace DRAM in many applications. So the total amount of DRAM (and thus the number of transistors) required is greatly diminished.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
PCs and consoles have been plenty fast enough for at least ten years, phones are plenty fast enough now, and other computers are mostly used to destroy highly educated jobs anyway. Let Moore's law stop. Please.
Long live Moore's Law!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Isn't it fun when somebody technically ignorant tries to explain technology? DRAM draws lots of power because the charge that defines a bit leaks away, and to avoid loss of data refresh cycles are required, which means power draw. Flash leakage is more than 10 orders of magnitude lower, which means that practically speaking a flash device does not need to be refreshed.
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The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density.
What took them so long?
I've been pointing out that a three-dimensional arrangement off components could continue FAR longer than an essentially single-layer arrangements since at least the 1970s.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So we will have on a desktop computer brains the size of a planet, but they will be bogged down complaining about being given menial tasks and how bored and depressed they are?
3DXpoint is not NAND flash. Its leakage characteristics (unpublished) would be likely different than flash or RAM.
The limits for general purpose CPUs for the about a decade has been power/heat, not transistor size. In the 1990s-2000s, performance could be increased with faster clockrates and more on-chip caches. Since about 2005, when clockrates passed 3GHz, the CPU vendors embraced multiple cores and have cut power demands.
Moore's Law can continue with 3D chips. Maybe a CPU of 2025 will be built with a first layer of transistors that covers the entire areal plane just for caching and with additional layers built vertically for other uses. If so, the number of transistors per chip might be much higher than a CPU of 2016.
The fact that such a common sense,logical idea,vertical stacking,can prove so disruptive to such a massive industry makes you really wonder how far they have had their heads up their arses for do long.. ..
It's lucky the building industry didn't have the same problem with the invention of the mud brick,about 8000+years ago.
If the chip fab industry is going to have such a massive headache with vertical intergration,then it looks like an even larger major miracle that they have managed to deliver what they have so far..
I suppose it will take the pressure off the companies trying to fudge the laws of physics as they approach the limits of what they can achieve with light,before having to switch to uv/x-ray etc,which still appears to be causing problems.
Does make me wonder why nobody just tried vertical stacking decades ago,it must have been done in r and d labs etc
But I'm scratching my head to understand why it's going to be so difficult to achieve such a blindingly obvious step ?
Perhaps somebody can explain to me why ?
As far as I can see,it's just a simple matter of getting stacked cores etc connected to each other somehow and instruction sets to 're-write.
Ye gods,what ever next,big
chunks of ram in the stack as well ?
Being only a simpleton,the only problem I can see with vertical stacking is a problem with heat extraction,having only the edges and top surface as cooling areas,but then just go from square stacks to dougnut..
Stacking transistors vertically means less surface exposed to a heatsink.
Unless I misunderstand something about how cooling these chips works, how can this problem be overcome?
The reason why chips are so cheap despite the large number of components on them is that all the components are produced at the same time. It's a complicated process with many steps using ludicrously expensive equipment for sure, but it's a single iteration through the production process. If you want to scale vertically, you have to increase the number of iterations. The production costs will asymptotically approach proportionality with the number of components on the chip.
3DXPoint should be phase-change and thus not hold a charge at all, the word "leakage" doesn't even make sense when applied to it (unless you try to redefine it as generic data loss over time).
Shit. No more progress. No more ever-powerful computers. What we will live for now? How we will cope without the excitement of another gigahertz increase? Our lives are over. Let's kill ourselves.
Super conducting processors are a thing... they run at Thz cycle frequencies in the lab.
Sure their on the level of complexity of the original IBM PC or so... but that can be remedied. More transistors isn't the only way to go faster... faster transistors is also an equally valid method. Implementing wave pipelines in more components is also valid (they've been used in varying degrees since the early 2000's) being able to go into 3 dimensions may help the practicality of wave pipelines which rely on constant time propagation though all circuits in the pipeline... to optimize both throughput and latency.
The implication is you will only be able to buy faster RAM, not more RAM. Having the same number of states but running computations on them faster isn't really the same thing as having more states or more complex circuits.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Your are right about that speed doesn't inherently increase memory density. However nothing is stopping anyone from reading multiple bits of information from single atoms...so yes higher densities are possible it's a somehwat separate problem from processor speed though....
Well there are some limits to what you suggest as well, due to quantum physics, uncertainty principle, etc. Through I doubt we are very close to those limits yet.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's gotten so small I have to jerk off with tweezers! And when every Slashdotter's mom blows me, I hear them whistling. I hate it when they whistle 'It's a Small World After All'.
Nope, high performance logic is already limited by the ratio of power density to surface area and it has been this way for almost a decade now. Increasing vertical density just makes this worse.
.... John von Neumann said..... In 1947.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quo...
It would appear that we have reached the limits of
what it is possible to achieve with computer technology,
although one should be careful with such statements,
as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.
For the record: I have produced this quote around 20 years ago when similar statements about the "end of moore within 5-10 years" were made