3 ms·

Here's my impression of the future of CMOS: (1) Scaling will be technically feasible for many more years. (Intel's roadmap goes to 5 nm, and researchers have a

Here's my impression of the future of CMOS: (1) Scaling will be technically feasible for many more years. (Intel's roadmap goes to 5 nm, and researchers have already made transistors as small as 3 nm.) (2) However, even if scaling is technically feasible, it may not be financially feasible. Quadruple patterning may get you smaller feature sizes, but at a very high cost. The alternative to quadruple patterning, x-ray lithography (called EUV), is also quite expensive, but at least there's some hope that its costs will drop. (3) Only if scaling is both technically feasible and financially feasible, we will continue to scale. But even then, the benefits of scaling will diminish (as they've been diminishing for years). Traditional scaling hasn't done much for silicon performance in years: recently most improvements in CMOS have come from straining the silicon with germanium. And the other beneficial side of scaling, cost, is also ending. Shrinking transistors gets you more chips per exposure/wafer, but at the same time it raises the costs of each exposure/wafer. We're finally reaching the point now where the increasing costs of each exposure/wafer are matching the savings of scaling. In light of all this, it's hard for me to see performace per dollar per year (which is not technically Moore's law I grant you) continue at the rapid pace of the past, even if technologies like x-ray lithography, III-V semiconductors, optical interconnects, and whatever end up panning out.

yaantc 13y ago
I fully agree. A lot of people say Moore's law is the transistors density doubling every 18 months (or 2 years, it varied). But this misses the economic angle that was present from the start: Moore talked about the density of the least cost process. So Moore's law stops either when we cannot cram more transistors in a given area, or when we cannot increase density without raising the cost per transistor. From what I've read I agree it's the economics variant that will end Moore's law. We'll have ways to shrink / increase performance, but not sure if there will be enough market to justify the rising costs. A lot is riding on the continuation or end of Moore's law, so we should expect a lot of spin on this issue. I note that Intel claims they will decrease the cost per transistor until 10 nm at least, which is not the case for other fabs. But those other fabs are more transparent on costs than Intel, and Intel said they will produce a low cast modem+AP chip at... TSMC. Mmmm... We have very interesting times ahead of us. Not only in silicon: a lot of progress in all areas was fueled by cheap computing power. A halt in silicon progress would be felt everywhere. Case in point: I'm in telecommunications. Every big steps was enabled by more computation per watt. That's what enabled to move from single channel TDM to CDMA to OFDMA with wider bands. If we can't increase exponentially the amount of computation per watt, then don't expect an exponential increase in wireless throughput either. It will progress, as everything, but at a slower pace.

yaantc 13y ago

I fully agree. A lot of people say Moore's law is the transistors density doubling every 18 months (or 2 years, it varied). But this misses the economic angle that was present from the start: Moore talked about the density of the least cost process. So Moore's law stops either when we cannot cram more transistors in a given area, or when we cannot increase density without raising the cost per transistor. From what I've read I agree it's the economics variant that will end Moore's law. We'll have ways to shrink / increase performance, but not sure if there will be enough market to justify the rising costs. A lot is riding on the continuation or end of Moore's law, so we should expect a lot of spin on this issue. I note that Intel claims they will decrease the cost per transistor until 10 nm at least, which is not the case for other fabs. But those other fabs are more transparent on costs than Intel, and Intel said they will produce a low cast modem+AP chip at... TSMC. Mmmm... We have very interesting times ahead of us. Not only in silicon: a lot of progress in all areas was fueled by cheap computing power. A halt in silicon progress would be felt everywhere. Case in point: I'm in telecommunications. Every big steps was enabled by more computation per watt. That's what enabled to move from single channel TDM to CDMA to OFDMA with wider bands. If we can't increase exponentially the amount of computation per watt, then don't expect an exponential increase in wireless throughput either. It will progress, as everything, but at a slower pace.