Moore to come?

It was 1965. The first computers based on integrated circuits had recently been launched. And Gordon Moore, a young executive in the fledgling semiconductor business, was asked by Electronics Magazine to jot down his thoughts on the future of the silicon chip.

Fifty years on and the Intel founder’s observations — neatly repackaged as Moore’s Law — have become shorthand for technological change. His prediction that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years, has never stopped reflecting the pace of change in a business that has gone from start-up to a $200bn (£114bn) a year industry in half a century.

It is an astonishing record — which other industry churns out products that double in performance, halve in size and double in efficiency once every two years? Just imagine if the car industry could make a similar boast.

But today the computer business stands at a crossroads. As engineers and scientists strive for the breakthroughs that will keep Moore’s observations intact, they are pushing the technology to a point where its key components will become so tiny that they consist of just a few atoms. And, as anyone with half an eye on the quantum world will know, when devices get this small, strange things begin to happen.

So how long has the industry got before the laws of physics step in and prevent traditional technology from taking another step?

According to Prof Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College Londonelectronics engineer, Moore’s Law will continue to hold in the short term, thanks to the type of breakthroughs in materials science, fabrication technology and chip design that have kept it going thus far.

He said: ‘Fabrication processes have become more and more accurate with much better materials. As the materials improve and become purer there are fewer possibilities of errors during fabrication.

‘And as things become more accurate you can become much smaller, you can do much finer etching because you are etching on a better material. Plus, the computer-aided design process of electronic circuits has also improved dramatically. There are far more accurate models and also computer technology allows us to simulate much larger models. Interestingly the modelling and computer simulation itself depends upon Moore’s Law, with more and more powerful computers enabling scientists to simulate larger circuits.’

Although these improvements are incremental they are no less mind-boggling. Last year Intel launched a new generation of chips featuring technology so tiny and efficient that it was hailed by Moore as the biggest transistor advance in 40 years.

These so-called high-k metal gate chips, made using a new 45nm lithography process (this refers to half the distance between identical components on a chip) have nearly twice the transistor density of previous chips built on the company’s earlier 65nm technology.