Perhaps the most far-reaching technological achievement over the last 50 years has been the steady march toward ever smaller transistors, fitting them more tightly together, and reducing their power consumption. And yet, ever since the two of us started our careers at Intel more than 20 years ago, we’ve been hearing the alarms that the […]
For decades, silicon transistors become smaller and smaller, but they are fast approaching the point at which they can no longer shrink the lengths of their gates—that is, how far current must travel in these devices. Now, by using atomically thin materials, scientists in China have created a transistor with a record-breaking gate length of […]
The end of Moore’s Law is looming. Engineers and designers can do only so much to miniaturize transistors and pack as many of them as possible into chips. So they’re turning to other approaches to chip design, incorporating technologies like AI into the process. Samsung, for instance, is adding AI to its memory chips to […]
I teach technology and information-systems courses at Northeastern University, in Boston. The two most popular laws that we teach there—and, one presumes, in most other academic departments that offer these subjects—are Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. Moore’s Law, as everyone by now knows, predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every […]
With COVID-19 shaking the global supply chain like an angry toddler with a box of jelly beans, the average person had to take a crash course in the semiconductor industry. And many of them didn’t like what they learned. Want a new car? Tough luck, not enough chips. A new gaming system? Same. But you […]
In the quest to keep Moore’s Law going, you might imagine wanting to shrink transistors until the smallest part was just an atom thick. Unfortunately, that won’t work for silicon. Its semiconducting properties require a third dimension. But there is a class of materials that act as semiconductors even though they are two-dimensional. And new […]
For a time, each new processor churned out more waste heat than the last. Had these chips kept on the trajectory they were following in the early 2000s, they would soon have packed about 6,400 watts onto each square centimeter—the power flux on the surface of the sun. Things never got that bad because engineers […]