Marty's Singularity Blog
The Singularity is happening now!
February 28, 2011 at 4:17 am
filed under Computing, Electronics, General, Singularity
Previously we talked about how Moore’s Law is actually part of a much larger phenomenon which stretches back to about 1890. This trend is a continuing exponential increase in price/performance of computing devices. The increase extends over five paradigms: punched card mechanical devices, relay devices, vacuum tube electronic devices, discrete transistor devices, and the fifth and current paradigm, integrated circuits. Moore’s Law itself was an observation about integrated circuits and did not include the first four paradigms.
Current estimates are that Moore’s Law has something on the order of five to ten more years to go. The end of Moore’s Law is expected because there is a limit to how small the feature size can be in integrated circuits. Once the size gets too small the devices will no longer work correctly because of a quantum mechanical phenomenon called tunneling.
Circuits are based on the fact that the charge flowing in the circuit, the individual electrons, stay in the circuit. Think of the power cord on your computer. The cord is made of copper wires that conduct the electricity surrounded by insulators which keep the electrons in the copper wires. Semiconductor devices are similar – there are conductors surrounded by insulators, both within the devices and in the traces that connect the devices. But if the physical dimensions of the insulators become small enough some of the electrons can “tunnel” through the insulators and appear outside them and thus outside the circuit. One way to get a grasp on this is to consider the particle/wave duality of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. In some ways the electron looks like a particle, in other ways it looks like a wave. When it looks like a particle it seems to be located at a certain position. When it looks like a wave it seems to occupy a volume of space. When the space enclosing the electron wave becomes small enough, part of the space occupied by the wave can be outside the enclosing space. Then the probability that the wave will appear outside that space becomes large enough that some of them do. Don’t feel too bad if you feel that you don’t understand this – as Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics, famously said “Nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
We see that there is a limit to Moore’s Law. Future advances in price/performance of semiconductor integrated circuits will become increasingly more difficult and increasingly more expensive. Indeed, this is happening already and has been happening for some time. Semiconductor fabrication plants, called fabs, have become increasingly more expensive to build. The manufacturing techniques have become increasingly more esoteric. Clearly the technology is nearing its limit.
So it will be the sixth paradigm, the one that follows and supplants integrated circuits, that will allow the remarkable trend of over a hundred years to continue. There are several emerging technologies that show promise. We will be discussing these as we go along.
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