Gordon Moore on Moore's Law
By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- EDN, September 18, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO -- Gordon Moore, the creator of Moore's Law, always harbored an uneasy relationship with the economic formula that bears his name. At first, he was embarrassed by any law named after him. Then he predicted the size of wafers would grow up to five times larger than current wafers if trends continued. Finally, he predicted that the number of transistors that could be crammed onto a piece of silicon would hit a wall as line widths shrunk.
He still believes that. "This is very expensive real estate," he told Electronic News in an interview here at the Intel Developer Forum. "It's about $1 billion an acre. It's a little more for processing, and less for DRAM."
But Moore also predicts that the end of the current formula -- which originally was that the number of transistors on a piece of silicon would double every 18 months, and which has changed to every two years -- will "not be the end of the world."
"You just make bigger chips," he said.
Moore said he once asked Stephen Hawking if there was a physical limit on chips. The answer was that it depended on the speed of light and the atomic nature of matter. He noted that before Hafnium was introduced as an insulator, the insulation had shrunk to five layers of atoms.
Hafnium is a stopgap measure, Moore believes. Ultimately, in another 10 to 15 years, chip development will hit a fundamental physical limit, after which the economics of chip production may not be the same as they have been for the past four decades. But he said that still isn't the end of chip production. It may simply be end of Moore's Law, as we know it.
For more from IDF, see:
Intel to support both HD-DVD and Blu-ray
Intel's 45-nm Nehalem hits silicon, Otellini says 32-nm test chips in production
Intel pushes core arrays, WiMax
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The article is interesting albeit wide in scope,
i.e. dealing with IC so large that they can
always be shrunk.
I believe that it would be a great service for the
whole eco-system if it is also addressed,
in separate articles, the topic of IC for which
Moore''s Law does not hold anymore because
they are pad-limited.
What are - if any - the successful path to cost
reduction? Optimizing the existing process
or re-thinking at the architecture of the whole
system that ultimately generated an IC not
further shrinkable?
[please print ONLY name]
Claudio De Diana - 2007-20-9 13:44:00 PDT -
I am an engineer. There, I said it. Every time I see mention of "Moore's Law," it rankles me. IT IS NOT A LAW!! It is an empirical fit to real world observations concerning how fast semiconductor technology moves forward. Look here for more:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_law
Si Valley engineer - 2007-20-9 08:45:00 PDT -
economics may be a stronger limit than physics!
guest - 2007-18-9 17:30:00 PDT
