London Calling: How to save Moore's Law

10/10/2012 11:30 AM EDT

We may be getting too concerned, too early. http://www.newtechpress.net/2012/07/23/the-move-to-450nm-if-why-and-when/

10/10/2012 11:55 AM EDT

Sounds like a good marketing trick Peter

10/10/2012 5:45 PM EDT

Why are we stressing that Moore's Law must continue? To the point of creating a phoney metric?

10/10/2012 5:58 PM EDT

Probably people feel that statement implies progress

10/10/2012 9:03 PM EDT

To acknowledge the end of Moore's law is to acknowledge what most of the semi industry has known for the past decade - the business model made possible by scaling is now obsolete. More than Moore will be upon us all. Peter mentions low power since mobile is now king, but what if you aren't in the mobile market? I think there is room for many different kinds of innovation.

10/10/2012 9:31 PM EDT

This does sound like smoke and mirrors, but Moore's law doesn't account for getting the same number of "better" things. For instance, if you get the same number of transistors as the last node but they use 50% less power, how do you measure that in terms of Moore's law? If you stack two chips on top of each other to get twice and many transistors in the same "space" does that count?

10/10/2012 10:41 PM EDT

OK, let's kill the Moore's law and start discussing possible alternatives going forward...clearly in original formulation it will not hold anymore...although it worked fine for over 50 years!

10/11/2012 10:42 AM EDT

Precisely the type of dodgy thinking that led to the demise of British manufacturing industry since the '60s and their living off W. Europe and the US as low-cost English speakers, middle-men and parasites who lie to start wars.

10/11/2012 11:41 AM EDT

EUV saturated so much of the total R&D spectrum that little bandwidth was left for alternative approaches. The decision to stick with EUV defies logic, especially in an industry that is so careful about managing risks. The fact that EUV sources are still at this late date 10 to 20 times too weak for HVM should indicate that the technology is not tractable. Furthermore, if a true 200 watt source was available for long term testing, the exposure tool would certainly have to undergo major changes to accommodate the thermal loading.

10/11/2012 12:19 PM EDT

There is a economics paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research by Robert J. Gordon titled "Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds". This paper describes how Moore's Law fueled the third of three "industrial revolutions" and now that it is coming to a close, will result in a completely different worlds from an economic perspective. Interesting reading. I don't agree with all of his conclusions, but I do think he has captured what we've all been seeing in the electronics industry for the past five years.

10/11/2012 12:22 PM EDT

thank you @rf_austin...can you mention where that paper can be found?...or email me? kris.iniewski@gmail.com

10/11/2012 1:11 PM EDT

There is the other Moore's law: cost per acre of finished chip remains constant.

In some ways these are dual. As ways are found to reduce dimensions, and if that delivers functional benefits, then there will be a tendency to aim for similar costs to cram more function into the same size.

But as factors like power density, leakage, and other limits tend to eliminate the advantage of making smaller chips we could see a trend to making cheaper chips. After all, the Si only costs a few cents per sq cm. If it starts to make sense to produce each sq cm more cheaply (and tricks like vertical connection allow us to package them small and keep connection distance low) then we will continue to see increased functionality at falling cost.

Just like we have had tremendous functionality and even performance growth since GHz scaling stalled a decade ago, we will continue to see functional and performance growth for a long time even if feature size stalls. The ingenuity and competition will simply shift into other dimensions.

10/11/2012 3:49 PM EDT

Few cents per sq cm? that is too low..a sq cm silicon chip will definately cost way more than that

10/11/2012 3:53 PM EDT

let's remember our history a little better: ML is not solely responsible for getting us this far. lots of design progress has let us use those extra devices: 16-32-64, onchip caches, pipelining, OOO, even multicore (surely the least creative way to sop up the area/gates!) what's really changed is that devices/area isn't the main concern any more. faster is always better, but now power efficiency is the primary driver (not that it was ever far from the front!)

10/11/2012 4:13 PM EDT

Historically the gains due to innovation are much smaller than due to Moore's law...you might not like it but your job was likely thanx to it (or more precisely economics behind it)

10/11/2012 7:29 PM EDT

The nature of Moores Law scaling is such that many of the proposed substitutes just don't cut it. Any incremental and most likely one time gains from 3d chips or carbon nanotubes or anything like that, pales in comparision to the gains in going from 180nm to 90nm to 45 nm etc.
Economicly this will be bad and we will go into a tech "dark ages" as there will be few new developments to spur investment and economic growth. Simply put why develop a new chip, if the new one cannot offer any more features? It ripples from there into vast swaths of the economy. We may get a short term bump in EE employment as the big players try to out design each other, but in the end the gains from doing that will by minimal. I think Intel knows this and that is way they are diversifying via there foundry ops to grap as much of the market share as possible when we get to the end.