Blog
The latest from Google Research
Moore’s Law, Part 2: More Moore and More than Moore
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
This is the second entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moore's Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.
--
One of the fundamental lessons derived for the past successes of the semiconductor industry comes for the observation that most of the innovations of the past ten years—those that indeed that have revolutionized the way CMOS transistors are manufactured nowadays—were initiated 10–15 years before they were incorporated into the CMOS process. Strained silicon research began in the early 90s, high-κ/metal-gate initiated in the mid-90s and multiple-gate transistors were pioneered in the late 90s. This fundamental observation generates a simple but fundamental question: “What should the ITRS do to identify now what the extended semiconductor industry will need 10–15 years from now?”
-
International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2012
More Moore
As we look at the years 2020–2025, we can see that the physical dimensions of
CMOS
manufacture are expected to be crossing below the 10 nanometer threshold. It is expected that as dimensions approach the 5–7 nanometer range it will be difficult to operate any transistor structure that is utilizing the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) physics as the basic principle of operation. Of course, we expect that new devices, like the
very promising tunnel transistors
, will allow a smooth transition from traditional CMOS to this new class of devices to reach these new levels of miniaturization. However, it is becoming clear that fundamental geometrical limits will be reached in the above timeframe. By fully utilizing the vertical dimension, it will be possible to
stack layers of transistors
on top of each other, and this 3D approach will continue to increase the number of components per square millimeter even when horizontal physical dimensions will no longer be amenable to any further reduction. It seems important, then, that we ask ourselves a fundamental question: “How will we be able to increase the computation and memory capacity when the device physical limits will be reached?” It becomes necessary to re-examine how we can get more information in a finite amount of space.
The semiconductor industry has thrived on
Boolean logic
; after all, for most applications the CMOS devices have been used as nothing more than an “on-off” switch. Consequently, it becomes of paramount importance to develop new techniques that allow the use of multiple (i.e., more than 2) logic states in any given and finite location, which evokes the magic of “
quantum computing
” looming in the distance. However, short of reaching this goal, a field of active research involves
increasing the number of states
available, e.g. 4–10 states, and to increase the number of “virtual transistors” by 2 every 2 years.
More than Moore
During the blazing progress propelled by Moore’s Law of semiconductor logic and memory products, many “complementary” technologies have progressed as well, although not necessarily scaling to Moore’s Law. Heterogeneous integration of multiple technologies has generated “added value” to devices with multiple applications, beyond the traditional semiconductor logic and memory products that had lead the semiconductor industry from the mid 60s to the 90s. A variety of wireless devices contain typical examples of this confluence of technologies, e.g. logic and memory devices, display technology, microelectricomechanical systems (
MEMS
), RF and Analog/Mixed-signal technologies (
RF/AMS
), etc.
The ITRS has incorporated More than Moore and RF/AMS chapters in the main body of the ITRS, but is uncertain whether this is sufficient to encompass the plethora of associated technologies now entangled into modern products, or the multi-faceted public consumer who has become an influential driver of the semiconductor industry, demanding custom functionality in commercial electronic products. In the next blog of this series, we will examine select data from the
ITRS Overall Roadmap Technology Characteristics (ORTC) 2012
and attempt to extrapolate the progress in the next 15 years, and its potential impact.
The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the
Research at Google Google+ page
. Please join, and share your thoughts.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
AI for Social Good
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
AutoML
Awards
BigQuery
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Compression
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICCV
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
Kaggle
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
materials science
Mixed Reality
ML
ML Fairness
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
NeurIPS
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
Recommender Systems
Reinforcement Learning
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Responsible AI
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Self-Supervised Learning
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Sound Search
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
Unsupervised Learning
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
Year in Review
YouTube
Archive
2022
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2021
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2020
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2019
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2018
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
