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posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 25 2016, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-good-thigns-must-come-to-an-end dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.

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.

For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.

[...]

This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/transistors-will-stop-shrinking-in-2021-moores-law-roadmap-predicts


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Monday July 25 2016, @07:02PM

    by TrumpetPower! (590) <ben@trumpetpower.com> on Monday July 25 2016, @07:02PM (#379982) Homepage

    ...went through a similar phase. At first, you bought a motor and attached all sorts of stuff to it. Then each tool came with its own motor...and today you find electric motors used for the vibrating alert on your phone, something incomprehensible to the world a century ago.

    In the age when a computer took the whole basement, the thought of using one just to dim the car's dome light in a pleasing manner was insane....

    Cheers,

    b&

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