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>Quantum tunneling will become relevant in 2016-2017 and has to be taken into account from there on. New materials and "insulated" circuits are required to make
by mos_basik 9y ago
>Quantum tunneling will become relevant in 2016-2017 and has to be taken into account from there on. New materials and "insulated" circuits are required to make everything work from here on.
He wrote this in 2015. Was he correct? I don't really know where to start researching something like this; is there anyone here familiar with the field who could comment on it?
- ivan_ah 9y agoI think he's referring to the general idea that transistor fabrication size shrinking cannot last forever. Since atoms have a fixed physical size, if the shrinking continues indefinitely, at some point the "wires" in the transistors will become zero-atoms thick (actually a few atoms thick). See this for explanations better than I could https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer Note the "quantum" here is not a good thing (like the theoretical "quantum speedup" possible for certain computations on quantum computers), but a bad thing: imagine you want to send current down this wire, but the current is jumpy and often leaks out of the wire to a neighbouring wire thus causing errors in computations.