MOOR'S LAW IS FAILINNG

Moore's Law is the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold true until 2020-2025.

Moore’s Law was not, of course, a law of nature. It was more like an engineer’s rule of thumb, capturing the pattern Moore had discerned in the early data on microchip production. But law or no, by 1975 engineers were designing and manufacturing chips a thousand times more complex than had been possible just 10 years before-just as Moore had predicted. That year, Moore revisited his prediction at the annual International Electron Devices Meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the professional association of electrical engineers. Acknowledging the increasing difficulty of the chip-making process, Moore slightly revised his “law.” From that point on, he said, the number of devices on a chip would double every two years. This prediction proved correct, too. Today, some people split the difference and say that microchip complexity will double every 18 months; other people loosely apply the term “Moore’s Law” to any rapidly improving aspect of computing, such as memory storage or bandwidth.

In 1965, Moore predicted that the number of transistors in an Integrated Circuit will double every two years ( Moore’s law).

By making transistors smaller, more circuits can be fabricated on the silicon wafer and therefore, the circuit becomes cheaper.

The reduction in channel length enables faster switching operations since less time is needed for the current to flow from drain to source. In other words, a smaller transistor leads to smaller capacitance.

This causes a reduction in transistor delay. As dynamic power is proportional to capacitance, the power consumption also reduces. This reduction of transistor size is called scaling.

The scaling improves cost, performance and power consumption with every new generation of technology.

Why is Moore’s Law Breaking Down?

There are three major factors contributing to the slowing rate of growth in processor power, and they’re all related.

First, you have electrical leakage. For decades, as transistors got smaller, they became more energy efficient.

Now, however, they have gotten so small, as small as 10 nanometers, that the channel that carries the electrical current through the transistor cannot always contain it.

This generates heat which can wear out the transistors more quickly, making them even more susceptible to leakage.

Heat isn’t just limited to one transistor though.

Billions of transistors leaking can seriously threaten the integrity of the whole chip, so the processor must reduce the amount of voltage it takes in or throttle the number of transistors in use to prevent overheating, limiting the processing power of the chip.

The end of Moore’s Law as we know it was always inevitable. There is a physical limit to what can fit on a silicon chip once you start working with nanometers.

Go any smaller and you start dealing with subatomic particles which immediately puts you in the realm of quantum computing, which is where we’re already headed.

One day though, after the transistor get stuck at three atoms and an electron, someone will notice that the computation power of newer forms of transistors are rapidly advancing.

Molecular, DNA, or Spintronic transistors will appear to pick up where silicon left off and Moore’s Law will be brought out of retirement until quantum computing makes discussions about limits irrelevant.

Ultimately, this has had less to do with transistors than it has to do with us as a society. Our hope and expectations for progress won’t end with the final generation of silicon transistors because we won’t let it.

We will find a way to bring Moore’s Law back for whatever else comes after simply because we want it to be true.