Everything Old is New Again
Published on 17 Jul 2006 at 9:08 pm |
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Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Technopolitical, Pure Geek, Information Technology, Economics and the Economy.
As a poor starving scholar back in the days of steam-powered computers and kerosene-fired televisions, I spent my few precious coins on dark beer and ‘Electronics’ magazine, the then-premier trade publication in the industry. Among the more interesting articles were those proclaiming the imminent demise of some then-dominant technology. One such article did not believe CRTs would survive the Carter administration. Later articles in the same vein predicted the end of disk drives as we know them. Oh, and the gasoline engine was doomed, as well.
But perhaps the most perennial favorite prognostication was the death of Moore’s Law. One of the first such articles appeared in the early eighties, long enough ago that the authors felt they needed to spend several paragraphs explaining Moore’s Law, before burying it.
They were wrong.
Every few years since, someone has buried Moore’s Law. There was a prediction that it wouldn’t work below one micron. We’re below one-tenth of a micron now. Optical lithography was a barrier. Whoops, there’s deep UV. Interconnects weren’t dense enough. Oh, we have seven, eight, nine-layer metal.
Today, the funeral directors are mumbling about leakage currents, but we haven’t fully exploited strained silicon, SiGe, or SoS. Lithography faces challenges; it may indeed finally be time for X-ray litho to take off.
Moore himself made the only modification his law has needed. He added the corollary that, with each generation, the device density would double, but the capital cost of the fab would, too.
There is a serious point here. Current technology does not stand still, and evolutionary development almost always trumps revolutionary development. There are disruptive technologies, but they come along about one-tenth as often as they are proclaimed. It’s a good reason to bet on the internal combustion engine, and against hydrogen, electric, etc.
I wish Dr. Moore a long and happy life. I sincerely hope he lives to an extra-ordinary old age. He will not, however, live long enough to see the end of Moore’s Law. Rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated.
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