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Moore’s Law — No, It’s Dead!
Intel’s Jim Keller thinks that there’s still life in Moore’s law, but there are doubters. Moore’s law is that the number of components on an integrated circuit will double every two years.
Victor Peng, CEO Xilinx, said that “Moore’s Law has run out of gas.”
Jensen Huang, CEO at Nvidia said that “Moore’s Law isn’t possible anymore.”
The major reason why Moore’s law may be at an end is that transistors just can’t be practically made much smaller. Transistors are now as small as 5 nanometers, and the technology for making them ever smaller is getting too expensive. Only TSMC, Intel and Samsung have made the investment to be able to make chips with transistors this tiny, and the investments in manufacturing is in the billions of dollars.
The investment dollars needed to keep upping chip performance isn’t limited to setting up sophisticated fabrication facilities. It requires some creative thinking. A paper by Nicholas Bloom and others at Stanford found that “the number of researchers required to double chip density today is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Research productivity in [the semiconductor industry] … is declining sharply, at a rate that averages about 6.8% per year.”
Another problem is that on the nanometer scale, transistors are susceptible to electrical leakage which can overheat and wear transistors out more quickly.
So we may have hit the wall, although Intel and others still think that they have some tricks for improving performance.
For the long term, transistors can’t be made much smaller without going to the subatomic scale and quantum computing. But while quantum transistors are actively being researched, it may be some time before they become practical.
