If you thought that Moore’s law was dead, then Jim Keller, Intel’s lead chip designer, has news for you. He says that we’re still a long way off from the limits of silicon, and he wants to prove it.
In 1965, Intel founder and computer legend Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors you could fit onto a chip doubled every couple of years or so. He thought that the trend might continue running for a decade or so, but it kept going, ushering in the modern technological age that we enjoy today. In 2015, Moore’s law celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Boffins and physicists pointed out, however, that eventually, you’d reach a hard limit imposed by the laws of physics. As you enter a smaller and smaller scales, quantum uncertainty takes over, and it becomes more challenging to prevent short circuits. Due to quantum effects, electrons can hop from one transistor to another, even if they are closed off from each other with solid material. This process causes chips to heat up and parse information less efficiently, harming their performance.
Ten years ago, many people in the industry believed that Moore’s law would run out of steam by 2020 – the year we’re in right now. But there’s been some push back against this idea from people in the industry. They claim that we’re a long way from maxing out silicon and that there are plenty of things that we can do to prevent stagnation.
Denser Gates
Jim Keller points out that there are several reasons to be optimistic. One of those is the fact that chip makers, like Intel, are now finding ways to make gates denser on CPUs without the electron leak problem. Keller believes that his firm can improve gate density by 50X, potentially overhauling the performance characteristics of CPUs entirely. Firms like Interbyte could see their orders shooting up from companies that need faster, more powerful servers.
3D Stacking
Then there’s the idea that if engineers can’t pack any more transistors onto a flat surface, they can try layering them on top of each other.
We’ve already seen this kind of thing in other areas, such as 3D NAND flash memory and high-bandwidth memory on some AMD graphics cards. So it is only a matter of time before it makes its way into the computing world.
Sure, it might require a lot of retooling, but that is something that Intel and others have been doing for many years, and there’s no sign that they’re keen to stop.
Graphene
Silicon is the material of choice for the semiconductor industry, but graphene is even more promising. The reason for this is that the carbon-based substance is able to conduct electricity with practically no resistance. This property means that is doesn’t heat up like traditional copper wires, meaning that it could replace them in chips.
Sure – graphene-based tech is a long way away – but it could mean that CPUs have higher clock speeds – perhaps as high as 100 GHz.
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