| Title | Moore's Law Is Dead. For Real This Time. Honest! | |
| Date | Thursday February 11 2016, @06:22PM | |
| Author | takyon | |
| Topic | ||
| from the where-is-mccoy-when-you-need-him dept. | ||
Moore's Law, coined eponymously for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, who, in a 1965 paper famously observed that component densities on integrated circuits will double every twelve months. He amended his observation in 1975 to a doubling every 24 months. Since then, the chip industry has borne out Moore's observation/prediction. However, there are still those who claim that Moore's Law is dying, just as many have done before.
However, Peter Bright over at Ars Technica is reporting notes a change in focus for the chip industry away from chasing Moore's Law. From the article:
Gordon Moore's observation was not driven by any particular scientific or engineering necessity. It was a reflection on just how things happened to turn out. The silicon chip industry took note and started using it not merely as a descriptive, predictive observation, but as a prescriptive, positive law: a target that the entire industry should hit.
Apparently, the industry isn't going to keep trying to hit that particular target moving forward, as we've seen with the recent delay of Intel's 10nm Cannonlake chips. This is for several reasons:
In the 2000s, it was clear that this geometric scaling was at an end, but various technical measures were devised to keep pace of the Moore's law curves. At 90nm, strained silicon was introduced; at 45nm, new materials to increase the capacitance of each transistor layered on the silicon were introduced. At 22nm, tri-gate transistors maintained the scaling.
But even these new techniques were up against a wall. The photolithography process used to transfer the chip patterns to the silicon wafer has been under considerable pressure: currently, light with a 193 nanometre wavelength is used to create chips with features just 14 nanometres. The oversized light wavelength is not insurmountable but adds extra complexity and cost to the manufacturing process. It has long been hoped that extreme UV (EUV), with a 13.5nm wavelength, will ease this constraint, but production-ready EUV technology has proven difficult to engineer.
Even with EUV, it's unclear just how much further scaling is even possible; at 2nm, transistors would be just 10 atoms wide, and it's unlikely that they'd operate reliably at such a small scale. Even if these problems were resolved, the specter of power usage and dissipation looms large: as the transistors are packed ever tighter, dissipating the energy that they use becomes ever harder.
The new techniques, such as strained silicon and tri-gate transistors, took more than a decade to put in production. EUV has been talked about for longer still. There's also a significant cost factor. There's a kind of undesired counterpart to Moore's law, Rock's law, which observes that the cost of a chip fabrication plant doubles every 4 years. Technology may provide ways to further increase the number of transistors packed into a chip, but the manufacturing facilities to build these chips may be prohibitively expensive—a situation compounded by the growing use of smaller, cheaper processors.
The article goes on to discuss how the industry will focus moving forward:
[More]
These difficulties mean that the Moore's law-driven roadmap is now at an end. ITRS decided in 2014 that its next roadmap would no longer be beholden to Moore's "law," and Nature writes that the next ITRS roadmap, published next month, will instead take a different approach.
Rather than focus on the technology used in the chips, the new roadmap will take an approach it describes as "More than Moore." The growth of smartphones and Internet of Things, for example, means that a diverse array of sensors and low power processors are now of great importance to chip companies. The highly integrated chips used in these devices mean that it's desirable to build processors that aren't just logic and cache, but which also include RAM, power regulation, analog components for GPS, cellular, and Wi-Fi radios, or even microelectromechanical components such as gyroscopes and accelerometers.
So what say you, Soylentils? Is Moore's Law really dead, or is this just another round of hyperbole?
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