Moore’s Law: Alive But More Expensive
By Ed Sperling
Feb. 4, 2009— Santa Clara, Calif. — Moore’s Law is still alive, but just how well it is depends on your perspective.
Paolo Gargini, Intel’s director of technology strategy, said the good news is that Intel can see its way to remaining on the Moore’s Law road map for at least the next 10 years. The bad news is that it’s going to cost a lot more money to do that—about $9 billion for fabs, $1 billion for technology and another $2 billion for products. And that’s at every new process node.
Speaking at DesignCon, Gargini said Intel is counting on 1 billion users of mobile Internet technology, 100 megabits per second of wireless throughput and 1 billion transistors on the go to turn a profit from that enormous investment. But the number of other companies that can afford to keep pace with their own fabs will continue to shrink.
From a technology standpoint, what will drive those changes are continuous shrinkage in the length of gates, the thickness of the insulation and voltage, as well as strained materials, high k dielectrics, metal gates and a host of new materials. In fact, Gargini said that in the future silicon may simply be the base material on which everything else is built. Intel is in the process of developing new deposition methods and experimenting with new materials and approaches. Those new approaches include nMOS, or n-type metal oxide semiconductor, quantum-field effect transistors (QWFETs), as well as nanowires and nanotubes.
Intel is on track to deliver 32nm chips this year, he said.
Tags: Architectural, economics, Intel, Moore's Law
February 9th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
“The central fact of industrial economics is not profit but loss – not the expectation of ending up with a surplus, its justification, and the legitimacy of the claims to a share in it; but the inevitable and real risk of ending up with an impoverishing deficit, and the need, the absolute need, to avoid this loss by providing against the risks”.
Peter Drucker. The New Society, 1950