I wrote The Blankenhorn Effect, my book on Moore’s Law, over five years ago.
Then, as now, people underestimated the impact of Moore’s Law, and predicted it would soon meet its demise.
In conventional terms — circuits per square inch of silicon — it’s possible that limit was reached in 2004. But parallel processing and low-power designs have kept the improvements coming, and exponential improvements have also come in other areas — hard drives, fiber optics, radios — just as the book predicted.
Now it looks like chips themselves have another 10 years of Moore’s Law improvements in them, thanks in part to design changes which replace the silicon semiconductor with metal conductors, and an insulator, hafnium oxide, between the conducting lines.
This let Intel put down lines 45 nanometers apart, against the 65 nanometer distances in other chips.
Instead of building with a semiconductor, turning parts of it into
a conductor using heat and oxidation, Intel is going to build with
conductors and insulators. In a way it’s a leap forward into the past,
because conductors-and-insulators was how glass-and-metal tubes worked.
The real breakthrough here, it seems to me, lies in the equipment
being used, and in the manufacturing technology. Given that Intel has
long used Applied Materials as its chief manufacturing technology
supplier, I’d say they deserve a shout-out. (Especially since my
brother-in-law works there — hi Bruce!)
