PDA

View Full Version : Moore's law drama



Docter
April 12th, 2007, 11:39 PM
http://www.physorg.com/news95575580.html


An IBM scientist holds a thinned wafer of silicon computer circuits, which is ready for bonding to another circuit wafer, where IBM's advanced "through-silicon via" process will connect the wafers together by etching thousands of holes through each layer and filling them with metal to create 3-D integrated stacked chips. The IBM breakthrough can shorten wire lengths inside chips up to 1000 times and allow for hundreds more pathways for data to flow among different functions on a chip. This technique will extend Moore's Law beyond its expected limits, paving the way for a new breed of smaller, faster and lower power chips. Credit: IBM

It's sad... but I find this a little exciting. I've attended lectures and seminars for IBM and Motorola (68k, ppc) and the "roadmap" for processor advancement has been fairly set in stone since the advent of the microprocessor. That is to say.. Moore's Law has held for so long (1965) and the end of the road was literally upon us.. infact behind us (don't let those clock speeds fool you). The next advancement in processors was going to be something revolutionary (good money was on quantum processing) but this 3d process seems to be extending the life of the old technology and Moore's Law is once again at full tilt.


The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.
That was Mooore's law.. basically put "Computing power will double every two years".

and that law has held for 40, way beyond what he originally envisaged.

Another forty anyone?

Redache
April 12th, 2007, 11:46 PM
I read about that. It's interesting but we really need a computer revolution to give the technology a good kick up the back side.