3 ms·
I'm curious if anyone here has any perspective on how close we are to absolute physical limits in CPU design. Last I heard, we're getting pretty close to dealin
by ufmace 13y ago
I'm curious if anyone here has any perspective on how close we are to absolute physical limits in CPU design. Last I heard, we're getting pretty close to dealing with quantum issues due to how small the transistor and connection size is getting, the frequency of light we need to do the etching, etc. I wonder if anybody knows how close we are to hitting hard limits in various categories. Surely, we'll hit some eventually, and I wonder what happens then.
- marcosdumay 13y agoCharge carriers tunneling through the insulating barrier of MOS-FETs are a problem for a few years already. The good news is that it reduces exponentialy with tension and insulator thikness, thus it can be worked around. Dopped areas on silicon transistors have a minimum diameter around 10nm, that's the uncertainty about the position of charge carriers. Features a bit smaller than that will probably work, but much smaller ones won't. That said, we are still far from the ultimate limits on CPU design. Those limits above apply to CMOS CPUs made of silicon what, despite describing all of the currently produced ones, is only one among many possibilities.
- noir_lord 13y ago> Surely, we'll hit some eventually, and I wonder what happens then. Probably some radical break through using some basic physics principle some guys worked on 30 years ago and left in a library somewhere ;).