There are researchers considering things all the way down to silicon. I worked on a contract for about a year and a half on a subproject of the research progra

There are researchers considering things all the way down to silicon. I worked on a contract for about a year and a half on a subproject of the research program described in this New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/rethinking-the-computer-at-80.html The project I consulted on was an attempt at a comprehensive system design that replaced everything all the way down to and including the hardware. System software was written in Haskell and in a newly-designed language called Breeze that offered both static and dynamic typing. The dynamic typing was supported by tagged hardware with specialized instructions (that effort included Tom Knight, one of the original designers of Lisp Machines). The organizing principle was that every piece of code and data was owned by a well-defined system entity with well-defined permissions that were proven correct both statically and dynamically. For example, sending data to an endpoint that did not have the required authorization to receive it was a type error. The thinking was that the state of the art is so broken (from the point of view of data integrity and security) that it's necessary to start from scratch. The overarching project name, appropriately enough, was "Clean Slate". I don't know what they're up to now.