Moore’s Law still relevant after half a century

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But it is becoming difficult to etch an increasing number of features on ever-smaller chips, which are increasingly susceptible to a wide range of errors and defects. More attention is required in designing and making chips, and additional processes and personnel need to be put in place to prevent errors.

In addition, with research under way into new materials and technologies, silicon may be on its way out, a change that could fundamentally transform Moore’s Law. There’s a lot of interest in a family of so-called III-V materials – compounds based on elements from the third and fifth columns of the periodic chart – such as gallium arsenide or indium gallium arsenide.

“Moore’s Law is morphing into something that is about new materials,” said Alex Lidow, a semiconductor industry veteran and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC).

EPC is making a possible silicon replacement, gallium nitride (GAN), which is a better conductor of electrons, giving it performance and power-efficiency advantages over silicon, Lidow said. GAN is already being used for power conversion and wireless communications, and could make its way to digital chips someday, though Lidow couldn’t provide a timeline.

“For the first time in 60 years there are valid candidates where it’s about superior material rather than smaller feature size,” Lidow said.

The economics of manufacturing smaller and faster chips are also tumbling. It’s getting more expensive to make advanced factories, and the returns on making those chips are diminishing. Important tools like EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, which transfers circuit patterns onto substrates, would make it possible to shrink chips to even smaller sizes but aren’t yet available.

“The semiconductor has always faced challenges, which have been speed bumps. Now we’re going up against a wall,” said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

Experts can’t predict where Moore’s Law will be years from now, but it will eventually fall as the physics and economics of making smaller chips no longer make practical sense. Nevertheless, the legacy of Moore’s Law will live on as a model for bringing down the price of components, which leads to cheaper devices and computers, McGregor said.

Moore’s 1965 article ushered in an era of ever-increasing technological change. “We’ve taken servers the size of a room down to a mobile chip. It’s amazing what we’ve done in that period of time,” McGregor said.''

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