[extropy-chat] diffraction limit

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, May 31, 2004 at 07:37:36AM -0400, Brent Neal wrote:

> Please do remember that "Moore's Law" is not a natural phenomenon, 

I do remember. You must be confusing me with Kurzweil, or Moravec.

> but rather an industry consensus on the progress they expect to make. 

No, Moore's law is an empirical observation about integration density 
progress over time, which has been linear in semi-log plot since 1959.

> There is nothing sacred about it, nor is there any particular reason 
> why we -have- to continue to follow it at its 18-24 month doubling rate.

Yes, there are very compelling reasons why Moore's law will hold until at
least 2012, or so -- economical demand driving feature shrink in
semiconductor photolithography. Major deviations from that will indicate that
something has gone seriously wrong with our economy, or ourselves. Physics
forecast is plain sailing, under clean blue skies.
 
> There are many reasons to expect that rate constant to lengthen, or 
> even for the exponential growth curve to fail. The one I think is 

I do expect a discontinuity before molecular electronics can pick up the
torch -- but there might not be one.

> most compelling is what some wags call "Moore's Third Law,"  which 
> is that the cost to build a new fabrication facility doubles roughly 
> every 36 months.  That's a pretty strong limiting factor, IMO.  

Big costs are building a new plant, refitting an existing plant to 300 mm are
less as Intel has shown. This is completely nonapplicable to organic devices
and self-assembly nanoelectronics, where the fab will become cheaper, and scale
to desktop fabbing.

> The arguments about "the end of CMOS" I don't put much stock in, 
> since I'm pretty confident we'll find something else. The question 
> is, will whatever we settle upon be cheap enough to be marketable 
> within one "Moore's Law period?"

OLED displays and printable electronics for smart RFID tags is already very
marketable, so I wouldn't start worrying yet. My next hot pick would be
nonvolatile organic memory, then molecular FPGAs (reconfigurable hardware in
general).
 
> There's also the fact that the current top end of CPUs have 
> begun to exceed the needs of the average user. Without a 

Moore's law doesn't unfortunately translate into system speed very well, and
current systems are always too slow for the power user -- that'd be power
gamer.

> CPU-intensive "killer app," to drive top end sales, chip 
> manufacturers will start either trying to lower costs to 
> go downmarket or to put in more bells and whistles to 
> make the product attractive.  One of these bells is the 
> low power consumption technology Intel is putting into 

Lower power consumption isn't a bell & whistle, it's the only way to drive a
current process forward at a power density now rapidly approaching nuclear
reactor cores. Ditto power supplies, the demand spikes rise to fast to supply
the CPU. 

> their M series chips - since laptops are where the growth 
> in personal computing is currently. (Of course, if they'd 

The growth in pesonal computing is embeddeds. Mobile applications are
low-power, which is incompatible with high-performance in current 
technology. 

> done a better job reading their tea leaves back in 2001, 
> they wouldn't be frantically trying to find ways to hack 
> their chips for low power consumption now.)

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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