Regarding the article, "ISuppli: Gear costs to derail Moore's Law in 2014," this prediction may well be true for consumer, commercial and industrial goods. But it would be quite interesting to get a bunch of industry heads together brainstorming on what kind of special applications might make use of finer geometries and would justify the investment.

Consider medical instrumentation. Camera pellets you swallow which transmit pictures of the entire gut as it is traversed are readily available today. But what about cameras for other organs? What about smarter surgical robots for heart or liver repair? Could these use smaller or denser chips?

What about space exploration? It's very expensive to shoot a huge payload into space--why we have so few probes? What if we shot three pound payloads--a dense IC, some sensors and cameras, a radio transceiver, and a few AA batteries? Could we do this for a few thousand dollars? Or under a million?

How about down-hole sensing in oil drilling? Send a robot down to see what's going on--why oil was missed. Are denser chips needed for this exploration?

Undersea exploration?

Brainstorming this area is much more interesting than guessing when the economic crossover point will occur.

Laurence Marks
Program Manager
IBM