Cringely on Moore’s Law
The I, Cringely posting Repeal Denied: MST will help extend Moore’s Law for another 15 years explains why he doesn’t think Moore’s Law will be repealed any time soon.
When will Moore’s Law be repealed? For the 30+ years I have been in and around the computer industry I have heard that question asked. The reason is obvious: this seemingly magical doubling of computing power per dollar every 18 months has been taking place since the early 1960s and surely has to stop sometime, right? Not yet, it doesn’t. Thanks to some clever new ways of making CMOS chips, it looks like Moore’s Law will remain in effect for at least another 15 years. This week’s column is my attempt to explain why this is so and to give some idea what it means to us all.
But there is a new technique on the block for reducing gate leakage from British inventor Robert Mears, best known for leading the team that developed the erbium doped fiber amplifier that has allowed in situ fiber-optic cables to massively increase their ability to carry data by simultaneously using multiple wavelengths of light to carry parallel data streams. This guy made today’s Internet possible. Mears has been working since 2001 on Mears Silicon Technology (MST), which is a new kind of semiconductor coating with unique and tunable qualities.
It will be interesting to see if MST is deployed and if it is better than Intel’s new Penryn technologies.
…John
