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.

Comments

Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[rbrander]

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.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Anonymous Coward]

And saying "well, just go vertical" fails Moore's law as well. "Square inch" is two dimensional. He didn't say cubed inch.

And you can't increase the population density per square mile by building tall buildings. Because that's no longer two dimensional, right?

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Pseudonym]

Google it, you'll get that it has to do with number of transistors, not complexity.

Read Moore's papers.

The AC is strictly incorrect in stating that it has "nothing to do with the number of transistors on a chip". It has something to do with that. However, they did state what Moore said accurately, unlike whatever source Google took you to.