Moore's Law Staying Strong Through 30nm 199
jeffsenter writes "The NYTimes has the story on IBM with JSR Micro advancing photolithograhy research to allow 30nm chips. Good news for Intel, AMD, Moore's Law and overclockers. The IBM researchers' technology advance allows for the same deep ultraviolet rays used to make chips today to be used at 30nm. Intel's newest CPUs are manufactured at 65nm and present technology tapped out soon after that. This buys Moore's Law a few more years."
Glad to see IBM catching up... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I've heard that one before... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not a law. It's just incorrectly called a law.
It should be plainly obvious that any exponentially increasing phenomenon can't be a "law". If this so-called law were to continue unabated for a couple of centuries, the number of transistors in a chip would exceed the number of atoms on planet earth. Clearly, a limit is going to be reached well before that happens.
Re:Moore's Law is so 1998 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the minimum then? (Score:5, Informative)
You are confusing dimensions. When intel refers to 65nm processes, they are talking about length and width ability to carve out features. Oxide layers "thickness" operates in the third dimension ("height"?) to provide resitant layers. It is much smaller then 65nm. Actual atoms are about 200 picometers in "width".
Moore's law died years ago. (Score:5, Informative)
From:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+Forty+years+of+Moores+Law
This is not about mhz ratings, though for a while these were doubling along the same rate as transistors per square inch were. Moore's comments were about integrated circuit "complexity" minimum component costs, which, if you are talking about transistors, has remained reasonable accurate. If you are talking about mhz per dollar, then you're going to find this is not accurate at all.
Long story short, if you had a 2 ghz machine in early 2003 and you're wondering why you aren't on an 8 ghz machine now, it's because mhz ratings have NOTHING to do with Moore's Law. Which is why I suggest referring to the Wiki entry [wikipedia.org] on it.
Also important is Kryder's Law [wikipedia.org] for HD storage capacity. Within a decade or two we may be able to store all creative works ever created on one drive.
Case in point: Hard drives increase a thousand-fold in storage space every 10.5 years. In 1996 I purchased a Compaq computer with a 1 gig drive. That was an insane amount of space at the time, but now, 10 years later, it looks like I may be able to purchase my first TB drive soon.
Re:on the BUSS (Score:4, Informative)
Why small? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I've heard that one before... (Score:3, Informative)
Interconnect capacitance is starting to be a real killer. As transistor sizes shrink, their capacity to source & sink current drops a bit. Even with using copper for the interconnect layers, because the cross section of these wires is so small the resistance is non negligible. What this all means is that the time required for the signal to travel over the wires that interconnect the transistors is on the average increasing even as feature size decreases. With gigahertz clock speeds, it already takes several clock cycles for a signal to travel from one side of a large chip to the other. Buffers have to be inserted along wires every several micrometers to keep signal delays from increasing quadratically with length.
The material that is used for gate dielectrics, currently silicon dioxide, will likely have to be different. Something with a higher dielectric is needed. Problems are starting to occur because this oxide layer is getting so thin.
Re:I've heard that one before... (Score:2, Informative)