Skip to main content

The End of Moore’s Law Anticipated By The Semiconductor Industry

THE ROADMAP TO A REVOLUTION
Moore’s law has a simple logic to it. The number of transistors in integrated circuits doubles every year.




Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made this prediction in 1965. At this time, 50 transistors per chip was the lowest per transistor cost. Moore predicted that, by 1970, an integrated chip would contain 1,000 transistors and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent.
This law was a reflection of reality at the time. And it has been a reflection of reality for a long, long time. Indeed, some time ago, the silicon chip industry noticed this trend and started using it as a roadmap for their products. What was a mere observation ended up becoming a target that the entire industry should achieve.
This wasn’t just a goal set by the industry. It became a roadmap for the companies in the semiconductor industry.
The Semiconductor Industry Association, a group that includes Intel, AMD, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and IBM, started publishing these roadmaps in 1992. In 1998, the group merged with other organizations around the world to produce the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. The most recent roadmap was published in 2013.
For three decades, geometric scaling—shrinking everything on the chip—enabled steady improvements and allowed the industry to be consistent with Moore’s prediction.




Yet Moore’s law wasn’t a rigid rule, Gordon Moore himself had to double the needed time from a year to two years in 1975. In the 2000s, geometric scaling was becoming harder and more difficult to achieve. The industry responded by developing various technical measures such as strained silcons, tri-gate transistors, and new materials to increase capacitance .
But these new techniques seemed to be running into a dead end. To produce the needed chip patterns on the silicon wafers on a smaller scale, light with a 193 nanometer wavelength is used to achieve features at a scale of 14 nanometers. This results in added complexity and costs to production.




The industry is looking at using extreme UV, light with a 13.5nm wavelength, to solve this problem, but its application has run into engineering problems. Even with this technology, further scaling seems to be difficult. At 2 nm, transistors in the chip would be 10 atoms wide and reliable operation seems unlikely. Assuming that this is even solved, power usage and dealing with the heat it releases becomes harder.
All these new techniques took more than a decade to implement and extreme UV has been discussed for far longer. The counterpart to Moore’s law, Rock’s law, states that cost of the fabrication plant for integrated circuits doubles every 4 years.
At this point, should we be surprised that the semiconductor is ready to declare Moore’s law as finished?




Source: Intel
Every improvement in a microprocessor’s performance was expensive for the industry. It meant that they had to develop the technology, techniques, and skills needed to scale the elements of the circuit so that more of them could be jammed on a chip and allow electrons to move between quickly. The boom of Silicon Valley seemed to mitigate this due to the huge quantities sold by the companies. This provided them with enough capital to cover the cost of upgrading to newer technology and still be able to drop the prices for their products.
But as time went on, the chip-making process became more complex with more steps and stages being required. It required that companies be able to synchronize changes to this complex process or else risk stopping progress altogether. This happened to Intel when it planned to switch to 10 nm in processors in 2016 but had to change plans due to problems in their fabrication plans, delaying it to second half of 2017.




An additional problem has that the increase in transistors have not necessarily made it easier to use these chip as the millennium rolled by. Due to heat constraints, only marginal improvements on performance have occurred in the latest chips. While theoretically performance has increased in a processor, software were having difficulties taking advantage of these improvements.
And so it has come to this. The ITRS decided in 2014 that its next roadmap, which will be published next month, would no longer follow Moore’s law and instead take a differing approach.
The industry will move away from focusing on the technology used in the chips and instead focus on a diverse array of sensors and low power processors, a move surely due to the development of smartphones and Internet of Things. The planned chips will go beyond previous chips by including RAM, power regulation, GPS components or gyroscopes, all features widely valued in mobile devices.




It also means that the goal is now much more varied than the previous doubling of transistors set. It means development of new technology needed in production. Materials used are included in this with companies exploring the use of carbon nanotubes and graphenes in microprocessors.
Geometric scaling isn’t necessarily off the books. Instead, the industry is simply holding out for the development of quantum properties, alternative materials and other technologies that could again allow for scaling again.
So for now, Moore’s law is back to a guide. But lest consumers fret, their gadgets and computers will still get more powerful…just not in the same way.







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

10 URLs to Find Out What Google Knows About You

Google is much more than just a search giant. It is also home to many of your favorite products: Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome, just to name a few. Apart from that, it also offers many products to help you  keep track of your data . Most of these are  hidden deep  inside the My Account dashboard, which many users don’t really know of. These hidden tools  may reveal interesting details  about your usage of Google’s many services. We’ve compiled a list of important Google URLs of some  hidden tools  that carry information of what you did with Google, mostly from the searches that you have made on their many products, the voice searches and typed out Google searches that you have made. Are you ready to  find out what how Google knows about you ? 1.  Google Dashboard Google Dashboard offers  transparency and control over the personal data stored with your Google Account. You can  view  and  manage the data gener...

Nine government sites hit by cyber attacks: NIC

The National Informatics Center (NIC) has revealed that as many as nine government websites were defaced by recent cyber attacks. The center further said that the servers, which hosts these government sites, suffer a number of hacking attempts on a daily basis. The websites www.kumbh2010haridwar.gov.in, www.ueppcb.uk.gov.in, www.gov.ua.nic.in/ujn, www.cdodoon.gov.in, www.arunachal.nic.in,www.bee-india.nic.in, www.civilsupplieskerala.gov.in, www.mpcb.gov.in and www.informatics.nic.in were  defaced , prompting authorities to  ramp up  the cyber security safeguards. In an RTI reply, the NIC, which reports to the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, said that it was impossible for the body to accurately quantify these attacks but they are usually blocked by security controls put in place. The Ministry was asked to provide details of hacking attempts made on the governments websites in the last ten years (2001-11) along with url names of the portal...

Solar car hits U.S. in round-the-world jaunt

Last October, the SolarWorld GT solar-powered car set out from Darwin, Australia on a drive around the world. It has since driven 3,001 kilometers (1,865 miles) across Australia, logged 1,947 km (1,210 miles) crossing New Zealand and been shipped across the Pacific Ocean. This Friday, it will embark on the U.S. leg of its journey, as it sets out across America from the University of California, Santa Barbara.   The SolarWorld GT is the result of a collaboration between solar panel manufacturer SolarWorld, and Bochum University of Applied Sciences in Germany. The four-wheeled, two-door, two-seat car gathers solar energy through photovoltaic panels built into its roof, with its solar generator offering a peak performance of 823 watts. Custom hub motors are located in both of the front wheels. The vehicle manages an average speed of 50 km/h (31 mph), with a claimed top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph). In order to demonstrate that solar powered cars needn't be a radical...