New York Times writer looks across the Moore’s law “abyss”
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8141
When the 50th anniversary of Moore’s law inspired extensive media celebration in April, the Wall Street Journal‘s Michael Malone called that prediction of ever-growing computing power “the heartbeat of the modern world.” He declared that a thousand years from now, people will remember “Moore’s Era.”
Maybe so, but there’s a problem today with the era’s continuation, as MIT’s Technology Review summarized in 2012:
Chip companies chart the progress of Moore’s Law—and set future goals—by comparing the size of the finest details on each generation of chips. The engineers at Intel and other chip companies have always needed to fret over what technical tricks they can come up with to keep that remarkable shrinking on track. Right now, those engineers are staring into something of an abyss.
John Markoff of the New York Times has been staring with them and for his readers. The abyss’s physics-and-engineering story fits nicely in a newspaper’s business section, where the Times has placed all three of Markoff’s recent articles about it. The Pulitzer Prize holder joined the Times in 1988 and usually writes for the science section.
The first of Markoff’s three articles appeared in July, when April’s media celebration of Moore’s law continued in most reporting about IBM’s then-brand-new ultradense 7-nanometer chip. Markoff celebrated too, but noted that IBM’s achievement wasn’t ready for mass production. “The tiny size of these transistors suggests that further advances will require new materials and new manufacturing techniques,” he wrote.
Like most other reporters, Markoff scanted that question of the physics-and-engineering innovations needed for crossing or filling the abyss. But he did briefly introduce the area of relevant potential innovation that Technology Review had engaged three years earlier. Under the headline “The Moore’s law Moon shot: The computer industry’s future depends on a behind-schedule technology that’s proving tough to get working,” that 2012 piece reported:
The technology that promises to keep Moore’s Law going after 2013 is known as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. It uses light to write a pattern into a chemical layer on top of a silicon wafer, which is then chemically etched into the silicon to make chip components. EUV lithography uses very high energy ultraviolet light rays that are closer to X-rays than visible light.
The article added: “But EUV has proved surprisingly difficult to perfect.”
The Times‘s headline for the second of Markoff’s articles, in September, showed some pessimism about general difficulties for Moore’s law. Four adjectives constituted the headline, with the fourth throwing a punch: “Smaller, faster, cheaper, over.” The subhead explained something about what the WSJ‘s Malone had called Moore’s era: “When Moore’s law collides with the laws of physics, computing won’t be the same.”
Markoff lamented that in recent years, “the acceleration predicted by Moore’s Law has slipped. Chip speeds stopped increasing almost a decade ago, the time between new generations is stretching out, and the cost of individual transistors has plateaued.” But one passage emphasized optimism:
There is hope that the same creativity that has extended Moore’s Law for so long could keep chip technology advancing.
If silicon is, in the words of David M. Brooks, a Harvard University computer scientist, “the canvas we paint on,” engineers can do more than just shrink the canvas.
Silicon could also give way to exotic materials for making faster and smaller transistors and new kinds of memory storage as well as optical rather than electronic communications links, said Alex Lidow, a physicist who is chief executive of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation, a maker of special-purpose chips in El Segundo, Calif.
There are a number of breakthrough candidates, like quantum computing, which—if it became practical—could vastly speed processing time, and spintronics, which in the far future could move computing to atomic-scale components.
Recently, there has been optimism in a new manufacturing technique, known as extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, lithography. If it works, EUV, which provides light waves roughly a tenth the length of the shortest of the light waves that make up the visible spectrum, will permit even smaller wires and features, while at the same time simplifying the chip-making process.
But the technology still has not been proved in commercial production.
Markoff’s third article , “IBM scientists find new way to shrink transistors (measuring in atoms)” shifted to reporting on a Science magazine paper , “End-bonded contacts for carbon nanotube transistors with low, size-independent resistance.” Here’s that paper’s abstract:
Moving beyond the limits of silicon transistors requires both a high-performance channel and high-quality electrical contacts. Carbon nanotubes provide high-performance channels below 10 nanometers, but as with silicon, the increase in contact resistance with decreasing size becomes a major performance roadblock. We report a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) transistor technology with an end-bonded contact scheme that leads to size-independent contact resistance to overcome the scaling limits of conventional side-bonded or planar contact schemes. A high-performance SWNT transistor was fabricated with a sub–10-nanometer contact length, showing a device resistance below 36 kilohms and on-current above 15 microampere per tube. The p-type end-bonded contact, formed through the reaction of molybdenum with the SWNT to form carbide, also exhibited no Schottky barrier. This strategy promises high-performance SWNT transistors, enabling future ultimately scaled device technologies.
“Now the industry has a new reason for optimism,” Markoff declares. He quotes Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineer: “Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors are excellent candidates for improving the performance and energy efficiency of future computing systems.”
Meanwhile, back in the silicon realm, the scientific literature offers physics and engineering analysis of a much-studied prospect for EUV lithography (EUVL): free-electron lasers (FELs) based on superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) linear accelerators with energy recovery. At the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, for example, in southeastern Virginia—where that prospect was already under study in 2003 —a June 2015 planning document cites “increasing industrial interest in this technology” and declares that the laboratory “is pursuing the possibility of strategic partnerships with industry to perform the physics and engineering design of an FEL suitable for such an application.”
The prospect involves not only important EUVL physics for a huge industry, but important accelerator and laser physics too.
It’s almost unmentioned in the popular press.
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.