Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future of Computer Chips

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Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future of Computer Chips - by John Markoff/ Technology/ International New York Times/ The New York Times/ nytimes.com

"At the inaugural International Solid-State Circuits Conference held on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1960, a young computer engineer named Douglas Engelbart introduced the electronics industry to the remarkably simple but groundbreaking concept of “scaling.”

Dr. Engelbart, who would later help develop the computer mouse and other personal computing technologies, theorized that as electronic circuits were made smaller, their components would get faster, require less power and become cheaper to produce — all at an accelerating pace.

Sitting in the audience that day was Gordon Moore, who went on to help found the Intel Corporation, the world’s largest chip maker. In 1965, Dr. Moore quantified the scaling principle and laid out what would have the impact of a computer-age Magna Carta. He predicted that the number of transistors that could be etched on a chip would double annually for at least a decade, leading to astronomical increases in computer power.

His prediction appeared in Electronics magazine in April 1965 and was later called Moore’s Law. It was never a law of physics, but rather an observation about the economics of a young industry that ended up holding true for a half-century..."

Gordon Moore, a founder of the Intel Corporation, in a photograph from the late 1960s. In 1965, in what came to be called Moore’s Law, Dr. Moore laid out the principle that the number of transistors that could be etched on a chip would double annually for at least a decade. Credit Intel


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IBM Aims to Replace Silicon Transistors with Carbon Nanotubes to Keep Up with Moore's Law - by Stacey Higginbotham/ Tech/ IBM/ Fortune.com

"Keeping the information economy humming isn’t easy.

IBM has developed a way that could help the semiconductor industry continue to make ever more dense chips that are both faster and more power efficient. Strap on your science hats while I explain what IBM has accomplished, and why it matters, because this is a significant step in keeping the information technology industry humming along..."

A carbon nanotube that would replace a silicon transistor. Image courtesy of IBM.


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Researchers Push Moore's Law With a 1-Nanometer Transistor Gate - by Timothy J. Seppala/ Gadgetry/ Engadget/ engadget.com

"The 5-nanometer limit is so ancient history.

Ready for some hardcore science about transistor elements that are a fraction of the width of a human hair? Good, because that's what this post is all about. "The semiconductor industry has long assumed that any gate below 5 nanometers wouldn't work, so anything below that was not even considered," University of California at Berkeley researcher Sujai Desay says. In recent years, though, that assertion has looked shaky, and now it's been thoroughly disproved thanks to the discoveries made by scientists at UC Berkeley and the magic of carbon nanotubes. Or, as they're more commonly known, graphene.

Ali Javey, Jeff Bokor, Chenming Hu, Moon Kim and H.S. Philip Wong crafted a transistor with a 1-nanometer gate. In theory this could shrink the weight and size of our already-thin electronics even more. For context, current silicon transistors have 20-nanometer gates. However, it's worth noting that graphene isn't the only material in use here. The UCB researchers also used molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) to achieve this result...."

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