The Journal Nature is reporting the latest bi-annual Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) Technology Roadmap due next month will for the first time “acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore’s law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.”
The article appearing in the February 9 issue, “The chips are down for Moore’s law”, is written by M. Mitchell Waldrop and walks through the many (familiar) challenges facing Moore’s Law. It’s an interesting read, if not startlingly new, and the actual roadmap may produce more surprises.
Waldrop writes, “…The doubling has already started to falter, thanks to the heat that is unavoidably generated when more and more silicon circuitry is jammed into the same small area. And some even more fundamental limits loom less than a decade away. Top-of-the-line microprocessors currently have circuit features that are around 14 nanometres across, smaller than most viruses. But by the early 2020s, says Paolo Gargini, chair of the road-mapping organization, “even with super-aggressive efforts, we’ll get to the 2–3-nanometre limit, where features are just 10 atoms across. Is that a device at all?” Probably not — if only because at that scale, electron behaviour will be governed by quantum uncertainties that will make transistors hopelessly unreliable. And despite vigorous research efforts, there is no obvious successor to today’s silicon technology.
“The industry road map released next month will for the first time lay out a research and development plan that is not centred on Moore’s law. Instead, it will follow what might be called the More than Moore strategy: rather than making the chips better and letting the applications follow, it will start with applications — from smartphones and supercomputers to data centres in the cloud — and work downwards to see what chips are needed to support them. Among those chips will be new generations of sensors, power-management circuits and other silicon devices required by a world in which computing is increasingly mobile.
“The changing landscape, in turn, could splinter the industry’s long tradition of unity in pursuit of Moore’s law. “Everybody is struggling with what the road map actually means,” says Daniel Reed, a computer scientist and vice-president for research at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) in Washington DC, which represents all the major US firms, has already said that it will cease its participation in the road-mapping effort once the report is out, and will instead pursue its own research and development agenda.”
Discussion around the fate of Moore’s Law has been fascinating to follow. Intel, perhaps no surprise, maintains the rule is healthy (see Intel commentary appearing recently in HPCwire, Moore’s Law – Not Dead – and Intel’s Use of HPC to Keep it Alive). We’ll see.
Here’s a link to the Nature article: http://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338