SCI FI Channel is now Syfy, but you can still get access to all your favorite SCI FI Channel content right here. Syfy features science fiction, drama, supernatural, fantasy, reality, paranormal, wrestling. The chips are down for Moore. The exponential improvement that the law describes transformed the first crude home computers of the 1. Internet, smartphones and the wired- up cars, refrigerators and thermostats that are becoming prevalent today. LISTENKerri Smith finds out from industry experts what will happen when Moore. At every stage, software developers came up with applications that strained the capabilities of existing chips; consumers asked more of their devices; and manufacturers rushed to meet that demand with next- generation chips. Since the 1. 99. 0s, in fact, the semiconductor industry has released a research road map every two years to coordinate what its hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers are doing to stay in step with the law . It has been largely thanks to this road map that computers have followed the law's exponential demands. Not for much longer. The doubling has already started to falter, thanks to the heat that is unavoidably generated when more and more silicon circuitry is jammed into the same small area. And some even more fundamental limits loom less than a decade away. Top- of- the- line microprocessors currently have circuit features that are around 1. But by the early 2. Paolo Gargini, chair of the road- mapping organization, . Sections; Top Stories; Video; Election; U.S. World; Entertainment; Health; Tech; Lifestyle; Money; Investigative; Sports; Good News; Weather; Photos; Shows. Shows; Good Morning America; World News Tonight; Nightline; 20/20.Provides the latest entertainment news on movies, music, television and Hollywood. The United States of America (USA), commonly referred to as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. California Litigation. The Litigation Section publishes California Litigation three times per year, under the supervision of the California Litigation Editorial Board. Each issue contains informative articles on themes of. This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1992. Is that a device at all? And despite vigorous research efforts, there is no obvious successor to today's silicon technology. The industry road map released next month will for the first time lay out a research and development plan that is not centred on Moore's law. Instead, it will follow what might be called the More than Moore strategy: rather than making the chips better and letting the applications follow, it will start with applications . Among those chips will be new generations of sensors, power- management circuits and other silicon devices required by a world in which computing is increasingly mobile. The changing landscape, in turn, could splinter the industry's long tradition of unity in pursuit of Moore's law. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) in Washington DC, which represents all the major US firms, has already said that it will cease its participation in the road- mapping effort once the report is out, and will instead pursue its own research and development agenda. Everyone agrees that the twilight of Moore's law will not mean the end of progress. That's what will happen with computers, he says: . Moore, who was then research director of Fairchild Semiconductor in San Jose, California, predicted wonders such as home computers, digital wristwatches, automatic cars and . But the heart of the essay was Moore's attempt to provide a timeline for this future. As a measure of a microprocessor's computational power, he looked at transistors, the on. On the basis of achievements by his company and others in the previous few years, he estimated that the number of transistors and other electronic components per chip was doubling every year. Moore, who would later co- found Intel in Santa Clara, California, underestimated the doubling time; in 1. But his vision was spot on. The future that he predicted started to arrive in the 1. Hewlett Packard hand calculators, the Apple II computer and the IBM PC. Demand for such products was soon exploding, and manufacturers were engaging in a brisk competition to offer more and more capable chips in smaller and smaller packages (see 'Moore's lore'). Source: Top, Intel; bottom, SIA/SRCThis was expensive. Improving a microprocessor's performance meant scaling down the elements of its circuit so that more of them could be packed together on the chip, and electrons could move between them more quickly. Scaling, in turn, required major refinements in photolithography, the basic technology for etching those microscopic elements onto a silicon surface. But the boom times were such that this hardly mattered: a self- reinforcing cycle set in. Chips were so versatile that manufacturers could make only a few types . That gave them enough cash to cover the cost of upgrading their fabrication facilities, or 'fabs', and still drop the prices, thereby fuelling demand even further. Soon, however, it became clear that this market- driven cycle could not sustain the relentless cadence of Moore's law by itself. The chip- making process was getting too complex, often involving hundreds of stages, which meant that taking the next step down in scale required a network of materials- suppliers and apparatus- makers to deliver the right upgrades at the right time. The idea, says Gargini, was . The US semiconductor industry launched the mapping effort in 1. Gargini, then the director of technology strategy at Intel, as its chair. In 1. 99. 8, the effort became the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, with participation from industry associations in Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Gargini and others had warned about it as far back as 1. But it hit hard nonetheless: things got too small. As electrons had to move faster and faster through silicon circuits that were smaller and smaller, the chips began to get too hot. That was a fundamental problem. Heat is hard to get rid of, and no one wants to buy a mobile phone that burns their hand. So manufacturers seized on the only solutions they had, says Gargini. First, they stopped trying to increase 'clock rates' . This effectively put a speed limit on the chip's electrons and limited their ability to generate heat. The maximum clock rate hasn't budged since 2. Second, to keep the chips moving along the Moore's law performance curve despite the speed limit, they redesigned the internal circuitry so that each chip contained not one processor, or 'core', but two, four or more. In practice, exploiting eight processors means that a problem has to be broken down into eight pieces . The question now is what will happen in the early 2. One possibility is to embrace a completely new paradigm . But none of these alternative paradigms has made it very far out of the laboratory. And many researchers think that quantum computing will offer advantages only for niche applications, rather than for the everyday tasks at which digital computing excels. There are many candidates, ranging from 2. D graphene- like compounds to spintronic materials that would compute by flipping electron spins rather than by moving electrons. That leaves the architectural approach: stick with silicon, but configure it in entirely new ways. One popular option is to go 3. D. Instead of etching flat circuits onto the surface of a silicon wafer, build skyscrapers: stack many thin layers of silicon with microcircuitry etched into each. In principle, this should make it possible to pack more computational power into the same space. In practice, however, this currently works only with memory chips, which do not have a heat problem: they use circuits that consume power only when a memory cell is accessed, which is not that often. One example is the Hybrid Memory Cube design, a stack of as many as eight memory layers that is being pursued by an industry consortium originally launched by Samsung and memory- maker Micron Technology in Boise, Idaho. Microprocessors are more challenging: stacking layer after layer of hot things simply makes them hotter. But one way to get around that problem is to do away with separate memory and microprocessing chips, as well as the prodigious amount of heat . Instead, integrate them in the same nanoscale high- rise. This is tricky, not least because current- generation microprocessors and memory chips are so different that they cannot be made on the same fab line; stacking them requires a complete redesign of the chip's structure. But several research groups are hoping to pull it off. Electrical engineer Subhasish Mitra and his colleagues at Stanford University in California have developed a hybrid architecture that stacks memory units together with transistors made from carbon nanotubes, which also carry current from layer to layer. The group thinks that its architecture could reduce energy use to less than one- thousandth that of standard chips. Going mobile. The second stumbling block for Moore's law was more of a surprise, but unfolded at roughly the same time as the first: computing went mobile. Twenty- five years ago, computing was defined by the needs of desktop and laptop machines; supercomputers and data centres used essentially the same microprocessors, just packed together in much greater numbers. Today, computing is increasingly defined by what high- end smartphones and tablets do . And these mobile devices have priorities very different from those of their more sedentary cousins. Keeping abreast of Moore's law is fairly far down on the list . Those server farms now dominate the market for powerful, cutting- edge microprocessors that do follow Moore's law. The chips in a typical smartphone must send and receive signals for voice calls, Wi- Fi, Bluetooth and the Global Positioning System, while also sensing touch, proximity, acceleration, magnetic fields . On top of that, the device must host special- purpose circuits for power management, to keep all those functions from draining the battery. The problem for chipmakers is that this specialization is undermining the self- reinforcing economic cycle that once kept Moore's law humming. Getting separately manufactured technologies to work together harmoniously in a single device is often a nightmare, says Bottoms, who heads the new road map's committee on the subject. At the University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineer Alberto Sangiovanni- Vincentelli and his colleagues are trying to change that: instead of starting from scratch each time, they think that people should create new devices by combining large chunks of existing circuitry that have known functionality. It's a challenge to make sure that the blocks work together, but . Some companies, notably Intel, are still trying to shrink components before they hit the wall imposed by quantum effects, he says.
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