MOORE IS NO LONGER LESS SMALLER TRANSISTORS COST BIG MONEY
INTEL’S 10NM NIGHTMARE WHAT WENT WRONG WITH INTEL’S LATEST NODE?
THE QUANTUM CONUNDRUM WHAT AN ENTANGLED MESS WE WEAVE…
COULD WETWARE WIN? NEURONS VERSUS TRANSISTORS: BUT WHICH IS BET TER?
If the demise of Moore’s Law has been called a little prematurely, one thing’s for sure: keeping it going is becoming increasingly costly. For instance, Intel says it plans to spend $20 billion on a pair of 7nm fabrication units, colloquially known as fabs. Meanwhile, just one of TSMC’s latest 5nm manufacturing plants, known as fab 18, is said to have cost £17 billion. That’s big money.
As far back as July 2015, Intel publicly confirmed that its 10nm node was in trouble. Fast forward nearly seven years and we’ve only just got our hands on its first desktop 10nm processors. Moore’s Law dictates a doubling of transistor densities every two years, implying a new process node on roughly the same cadence. So something has gone horribly wrong. But what, exactly?
Forget material science, feature density, and all that oldfashioned stuff involving classical physics and chemistry. Could quantum computing make Moore’s Law completely redundant, but in a good way?
Is there something special about the human mind that gives it an inherent advantage over any conventional, binary computer? In simple numerical terms, brains are still far superior. Composed of something like 100 billion neurons, there’s complexity beyond any existing computer chip, even before you acknowledge that neurons are far more complex than binary transistors.
BY SOME ESTIMATES, over half of the world’s economic growth over the last 50 years has depended on Moore’s Law. What was once an esoteric observation involving transistor density in semiconductors is arguably now the most important economic driving force on the planet. It’s the technological gift that keeps on giving. More transistors. More computing performance. For less money. Year after year.
Those huge costs are the major reason why the industry is consolidating down to just a few major players. The price of entering the game, let alone of maintaining some competitiveness, is incredibly prohibitive. Another intriguing indicator of just how resource-intensive chip manufacturing has become can be found in the example of ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography). A Dutch company founded in 1984, it specializes in the photolithography machines used by all the big players in chip production. If you want to knock out semiconductors using the latest EUV processes, you need an ASML machine.