Page 214 - Science at the nanoscale

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Future Trends
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or from engineering problems such as chip overheating. The
basis for propagating Moore’s law is the International Technology
4
Roadmap for Semiconductors, a document which maps out the
research and development required to deliver the incremental
It is becoming increas-
improvements in CMOS technology.
ingly clear that a demanding series of linked technological break-
throughs are needed as time progresses, and a roadblock may be
reached sometime around 2020.
Richard Jones envisions three possible outcomes beyond 2020.
The first is that these problems will be solved, and Moore’s law
will continue through further incremental developments. The his-
tory of the semiconductor industry tells us that this possibility
should not be taken lightly; the ingenuity of engineers and scien-
tists to overcome seemingly insurmountable technical problems
has kept Moore’s law on track for forty years. The second possi-
bility is that a fundamentally new technology, quite different from
CMOS, will be developed, giving Moore’s law a new lease of life.
Currently, the likely contenders appear to be spintronics, quan-
tum computing, molecular electronics, or graphene electronics.
Although there has been a lot of excellent science being reported
in these fields, none of these developments are close to commer-
cialisation yet.
The third possibility that Jones proposes is that we enter into a
period of relatively slow innovation in hardware, but this would
not necessarily mean that there would be no developments in soft-
ware. On the contrary, as raw computing power gets less abun-
dant, human ingenuity in making the most of available power is
likely to have a greater impact. The economics of the industry
would change dramatically, and since the hardware development
cycle would lengthen, the huge capital cost of wafer fabrication 5 ch09
plants would be spread over a greater period of time, leading to
the chip business becoming increasingly commoditised.
9.3 SPINTRONICS AND SURFACE CHEMISTRY
The 2007 Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and
Peter Gr¨unberg “for their discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance
4 http://www.itrs.net/
5 Richard A. L. Jones, Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life, OUP (2004), and his
blog: http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/