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Subject: Re: Introducing "No-Moore's Law"

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 16:03:54 02/28/03

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>On February 26, 2003 at 12:03:42, Steve J wrote:
>
>>   I've spent 25 years in manufacturing side of the semiconductor industry and
>>would like to introduce what I call "No-Moore's Law".  It describes the physical
>>limitations that silicon (or any other compound) will run out of gas and can be
>>shrunk no more.  It also talks about some of the financial limitations of
>>shrinking die.

Some comments:

1) You can look at this like clock speed bounds. How many clock speeds have been
declared as upper limits? I remember Microprocessor Report quoting a
well-regarded microprocessor designer saying that 33MHz was the fastest a
processor will ever run, because any faster and the mathematics for dealing with
EM interference would be impossible to deal with. Well, advances in fab
processes have taken care of that and now chips are running 100 times faster
than that limit.

2) ... Similar to feature sizes. I hardly know anything about photolithography,
but wasn't ~0.15um supposed to be some limit recently because any smaller and
the wavelengths of light being used were simply too big to etch accurately?
Apparently that problem has been licked too.

I guess my point with these two comments is that new techniques have removed
predicted barriers to smaller & faster semiconductors. While I won't argue that
feature sizes will eventually be fractions of an atom's size, it seems possible
that advances in manufacturing will remove one of the barriers you suggest,
namely cost.

Also speaking to cost, economy of scale seems to affect processors. It seems
like the price of the average mainstream processor has been dropping like a rock
over the past few years. You can get an Athlon 2000+ for $70 now, even though
fabs have only been getting more expensive. The only explanation I can think of
is that more people are buying more computers. That trend may keep up and offset
the prices of new fab equipment.

Advances in materials may be able to increase clock speeds even if feature sizes
don't decrease. Low-k, SOI, whatnot.

Same with design techniques. Apparently some automatic routing tools were used
for Prescott that decreased clock skew across the entire chip to less than an
inverter and routed some FP logic to shorten critical paths. Maybe tolerances in
manufacturing and more advanced tools will enable things like wave pipelining
and async logic on a broader basis.

Anyway, I predict this stuff will get more interesting over the next decade, not
less...

-Tom



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