Research: Moore’s law and what is going to happen after 2021.

Rodrigo Federico Montoya Villanueva

Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey
Mechatronics Engineering

Toluca
2018
Index

 History
 As an evolving target for industry
 Major enabling factors
 Consequences and limitations
 Other formulations and similar observations

History

Gordon Earle Moore (born January 3, 1929) is an American

businessman, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel Corporation,
and the author of Moore's law. In an article published on April 19,
1965, Moore observed that the number of components (transistors,
resistors, diodes or capacitors) in a dense integrated circuit had
doubled approximately every year and speculated that it would
continue to do so for at least the next ten years. In 1975, he revised
the forecast rate to approximately every two years.

As an evolving target for industry

Rock's Law, named for Arthur Rock, says that the cost of a
semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of
2003, the price had already reached about 3 billion US dollars.

Rock's Law can be seen as the economic flipside to Moore's Law;

the latter is a direct consequence of the ongoing growth of the
capital-intensive semiconductor industry-innovative and popular
products mean more profits, meaning more capital available to invest
in ever higher levels of large-scale integration, which in turn leads to
creation of even more innovative products.

The semiconductor industry has always been extremely capital-

intensive, with very low unit manufacturing costs. Thus, the ultimate
limits to growth of the industry will constrain the maximum amount of
capital that can be invested in new products; at some point, Rock's
Law will collide with Moore's Law
Major enabling factors

Future trends

Quantum computing

The reduction of feature size also implies a decrease in

operation voltage, since the internal fields would otherwise
exceed the breakthrough fields of all available materials. Within
the next ten years, the operational voltage is expected to
decrease to less than one volt. While the capacitance of real
capacitors is higher, the number of electrons stored in a
memory cell will become a small integer number in the near
future, again bringing quantum physics into play.
Classical physics is an approximation of the more fundamental
laws of quantum mechanics, until today, has proved sufficiently
accurate for all fields of engineering. Quantum mechanics is
required in order to understand the properties of
semiconductors, such as current – voltage curves of diodes,
from their microscope structure. Once these properties are
established, however, it becomes possible to describe the
operation of semiconductor devices on the basis of the classical
theory of electrodynamics.
This classical description of the operation of semiconductor
devices will become impossible when the feature size reaches
the coherence length. This quantity depends on the details of
the material, the processing and the temperature at which the
device operates, but typically is in the range of a few
nanometers to some tens of nanometers.

Consequences and limitations

The chip industry has kept Moore’s prediction alive, with Intel
leading the charge. And computing companies have found
plenty to do with the continual supply of extra transistors. But
Intel pushed back its next transistor technology, with features
as small as 10 nanometers, from 2016 to late 2017. The
company has also decided to increase the time between future
generations (see “Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law”). And
a technology roadmap for Moore’s Law maintained by an
industry group, including the world’s largest chip makers, is
being scrapped. Intel has suggested silicon transistors can only
keep shrinking for another five years.

The next logical step, says Mr Snir of Argonne National

Laboratory, is “gate-all-around” transistors, in which the
channel is surrounded by its gate on all four sides. That
offers maximum control, but it adds extra steps to the
manufacturing process, since the gate must now be built
in multiple sections. Big chipmakers such as Samsung
have said that it might take gate-all-around transistors to
build chips with features 5nm apart, a stage that
Samsung and other makers expect to be reached by the
early 2020s.
Beyond that, more exotic solutions may be needed. One
idea is to take advantage of the quantum tunneling that is
such an annoyance for conventional transistors, and that
will only get worse as transistors shrink further. It is
possible, by applying electrical fields, to control the rate at
which tunneling happens. A low rate of leakage would
correspond to a 0; a high rate to a 1. The first
experimental tunneling transistor was demonstrated by a
 team at IBM in 2004. Since then researchers have been
working to commercialize them.

A pipeline of new technologies to prolong Moore’s magic

THE world’s IT firms spend huge amounts on research and development.
In 2015 they occupied three of the top five places in the list of biggest R&D
spenders compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consultancy. Samsung,
Intel and Microsoft, the three largest, alone shelled out $37 billion between
them. Many of the companies are working on projects to replace the magic
of Moore’s law. Here are a few promising ideas. (The Economist, 2016).

 Optical communication: the use of light instead of electricity to

communicate between computers, and even within chips. This should
cut energy use and boost performance Hewlett-Packard,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 Better memory technologies: building new kinds of fast, dense, cheap
memory to ease one bottleneck in computer performance Intel,
Micron.
 Quantum-well transistors: the use of quantum phenomena to alter the
behavior of electrical-charge carriers in a transistor to boost its
performance, enabling extra iterations of Moore’s law, increased
speed and lower power consumption Intel.
 Developing new chips and new software to automate the writing of
code for machines built from clusters of specialized chips. This has
proved especially difficult Soft Machines.
 Approximate computing: making computers’ internal representation of
numbers less precise to reduce the numbers of bits per calculation
and thus save energy; and allowing computers to make random small
mistakes in calculations that cancel each other out over time, which
will also save energy University of Washington, Microsoft.
 Neuromorphic computing: developing devices loosely modelled on
the tangled, densely linked bundles of neurons that process
information in animal brains. This may cut energy use and prove
useful for pattern recognition and another AI-related tasks IBM,
Qualcomm.
 Carbon nanotube transistors: these rolled-up sheets of graphene
promise low power consumption and high speed, as graphene does.
Unlike graphene, they can also be switched off easily. But they have
proved difficult to mass-produce IBM, Stanford University.
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