“The number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years”*…
Moore’s Law has held up almost astoundingly well…
This seemingly inexorable march has enabled an extraordinary range of new products and services– from intercontinental ballistic missiles to global environmental monitoring systems and from smart phones to medical implants… But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are sounding an alarm…
The speed of our technology doubles every year, right? Not anymore. We’ve come to take for granted that as the years go on, computing technology gets faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient.
In their recent paper, “Science and research policy at the end of Moore’s law” published in Nature Electronics, however, Carnegie Mellon University researchers Hassan Khan, David Hounshell, and Erica Fuchs argue that future advancement in microprocessors faces new and unprecedented challenges…
In the seven decades following the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, warnings about impending limits to miniaturization and the corresponding slow down of Moore’s Law have come regularly from industry observers and academic researchers. Despite these warnings, semiconductor technology continually progressed along the Moore’s Law trajectory. Khan, Hounshell, and Fuchs’ archival work and oral histories, however, make clear that times are changing.
“The current technological and structural challenges facing the industry are unprecedented and undermine the incentives for continued collective action in research and development,” the authors state in the paper, “which has underpinned the last 50 years of transformational worldwide economic growth and social advance.”
As the authors explain in their paper, progress in semiconductor technology is undergoing a seismic shift driven by changes in the underlying technology and product-end markets…
To continue advancing general purpose computing capabilities at reduced cost with economy-wide benefits will likely require entirely new semiconductor process and device technology.” explains Engineering and Public Policy graduate Hassan Khan. “The underlying science for this technology is as of yet unknown, and will require significant research funds – an order of magnitude more than is being invested today.”
The authors conclude by arguing that the lack of private incentives creates a case for greatly increased public funding and the need for leadership beyond traditional stakeholders. They suggest that funding is needed of $600 million dollars per year with 90% of those funds from public research dollars, and the rest most likely from defense agencies…
Read the complete summary at “Moore’s law has ended. What comes next?“; read the complete Nature article here.
* a paraphrase of Gordon’s Moore’s assertion– known as “Moore’s law”– in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, published on April 19, 1965
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As we pack ’em ever tighter, we might send carefully-computed birthday greetings to Thomas John Watson Sr.; he was born on this date in 1874. A mentee of from John Henry Patterson’s at NCR, where Watson began his career, Watson became the chairman and CEO of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which, in 1924, he renamed International Business Machines– IBM. He began using his famous motto– THINK– while still at NCR, but carried it with him to IBM… where it became that corporation’s first trademark (in 1935). That motto was the inspiration for the naming of the Thinkpad– and Watson himself (along with Sherlock’s Holmes’ trusty companion), for the naming of IBM’s Artificial Intelligence product.
