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Saving Moore's Law

Wednesday, January 8, 2020

It’s a well-known observation: The number of transistors on a microchip will double roughly every two years. And, thanks to advances in miniaturization and performance, this axiom, known as Moore’s Law, has held true since 1965, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first made that statement based on emerging trends in chip manufacturing at Intel. 

However, integrated circuits are hitting hard physical limits that are rendering Moore’s Law obsolete — elements on a dense integrated circuit (IC) can get only so small and so tightly packed together before they begin to interfere with each other and otherwise lose their functionality.

“Apart from fundamental physical limits to the scaling of transistor feature sizes below a few nanometers, there are significant challenges in terms of reducing power dissipation, as well as justifying the incurred cost of IC fabrication,” said Kaustav Banerjee, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa Barbara. As a result, the very devices that we rely on for their steadily improving performance and versatility — computers, smartphones, internet-enabled gadgets — would also hit a limit, he said.

But according to Banerjee, one of world’s leading scientific minds in the field of nanoelectronics, there is a way to maintain Moore’s Law indefinitely, by taking advantage of relatively new and promising two-dimensional (2D) materials and combining them with monolithic 3D (M3D) integration practices to create ultra-compact, yet high-performing electronic chips that could overcome the challenges that face conventional integrated circuits. While Banerjee first disclosed this idea in a visionary article back in 2014, more detailed research evaluating this technology from his Nanoelectronics Research Lab was recently published in the IEEE Journal of the Electron Devices Society.

Read the complete article.

Artist's concept depicting elements related to continuing Moore's Law. Illustration by Brian Long

Artist's concept depicting elements related to continuing Moore's Law. Illustration by Brian Long