Is Moore’s law still applicable today? And is there any limitations to just how small a transistor can actually get?
In: Physics
It is common consensus among the Computer Engineering research community that Moore’s Law, doubling the number of transistors in a chip every 18 months, is dead as of the mid-2010s. There are multiple reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that smallest transistor sizes today, 10s-100s of atoms wide, are extremely difficult to produce without errors (intolerable variations in size and electrical properties). As a result, chip producers have fewer good chips to sell and the chips aren’t cost-effective to produce. They (Intel, Samsung, Global Foundries, TSMC) can make chips with smaller transistors, but advances in chip manufacturing to make it financially worth it have slowed well below the rate predicted by Moore’s Law.
An inaccurate illustration: if your transistors are 25-atoms wide, a manufacturing defect of merely 5 atoms changes the electric property by 20%.
It is unclear whether single-atom or sub-atomic transistors are possible. In my opinion, the areas of focus in computer hardware development are shifting away from reducing transistor sizes (“technology scaling”), and so consumer-grade, mass-produced <1nm-tech chips will not be produced in our lifetime. I hope I’m proved wrong.
Source: Am PhD student in the field.
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