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Moore's Law to Hit a Brick Wall at 18nm

Posted 06/16/09 at 04:00:10 PM  by Paul Lilly

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Intel co-founder Gordon Moore once predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 to 24 months, a prediction which has been famously dubbed Moore's Law. But according to market research firm iSuppli, the move to 18nm will signal the end of Moore's Law.

"The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20nm, to 18nm nodes," said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. "At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it."

So when exactly will it happen? According to iSupply, in the year 2014. In 2007, Gordon Moore said his prediction could be upheld for at least another decade. Five years from now, one of them is going to be wrong.

COMMENTS:12
TAGS: cpu, processor, technology, Moore's Law, manufacturing process, 18nm, transistors
COMMENTS
avatarIt's a good thing that Intel

Submitted by Blaze589 on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 9:35pm

It's a good thing that Intel is doing research on Silicon Photonics or laser based CPUs'.

http://www.podtech.net/home/1128/intels-laser-enabled-chips-could-be-silver-bullet

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avatarfunny

Submitted by mesiah on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 9:06pm

It's kind of funny that today this article is released saying that moores law will soon come to an end due to manufacturing costs/limitations below 18nm when yesterday you posted an article about how toshiba has made a breakthrough and we will be seeing 16nm ahead of market estimates.

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avatarToshiba is doing that for

Submitted by compro01 on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 10:30am

Toshiba is doing that for flash memory, which are substantially less complex circuits than CPUs, IIRC, and they also don't need to run nearly as fast.  the faster you go, the more power CMOS eats and the more heat you need to deal with.

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avatarTouche

Submitted by mesiah on Wed, 06/17/2009 - 8:14pm

You are right, I overlooked the fact that the previous article was in reference to flash memory. But it just goes to show that noone can predict what kind of manufacturing breakthroughs we are going to have in the next 10 years.

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avatarMoore's What?

Submitted by jwalch.hawk on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 7:33pm

It has always killed me that this is revered as Moore's "Law"...  It should really be Moore's Hypothesis Which Just Happens To Have Been Approximately Right Thus Far.  Or whatever.  The point is that there's no real scientific reason the hypothesis *should* be true...  It's more a self-fulfilling prophesy than it is anything else.

 

Anyway, I agree with the other comments pointing out how it's impossible to know what could be the case in five years.  You might as well just go polish your crystal ball if you want to predict transistor sizes that far into the future. 

EDIT: It seems that link below to the Halfhill article goes on that rant for me. 

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avatarhow many times have we heard

Submitted by FrancesTheMute on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 3:36pm

how many times have we heard this?  Seems like once a year we hear that Moore's law will end when X happens, and then it happens and they're like "oh, well we found a way to get around that, now Moore's law will not apply when Y happens..."

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avatarMemristor`s

Submitted by Mosher on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 3:13pm

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/white_paper_the_memristorthis previous article seems to show that by 2015 we will have much smaller capacitys than that.(unless I am not understanding how the memristor works prperly)

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avatarWell...

Submitted by nmanguy on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 3:03pm

That's still five years away from now. Who knows what crazy stuff will be invented by then.

 

 

What would you have done in mid 2004 if someone said that people would be able to buy quad core, 45 nm computers with videocards that have power measured in terraflops, storage measured in Terrabytes, etc.

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avatardidnt people think it was

Submitted by comptech08 on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 1:35pm

didnt people think it was going to get debunked before?  But has not.  Just never know till it happens.

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avatarHuh? I thought you guys

Submitted by seinjunkie on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 1:16pm

Huh? I thought you guys debunked Moore's Law. Or Tom Halfhill did it for you. Either way, it's been broken for a while.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/The-Myths-of-Moore--s-Law

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avatarR-Tard

Submitted by foamcup on Tue, 06/16/2009 - 1:27pm

Try reading the article you linked to. 

Moore's law describes component integration on integrated circuits that are economical to manufacture.  It doesn't describe clock frequency or other aspects of processor performance. Actually, Moore's article doesn't mention microprocessors at all, because they weren't invented until six years after his article appeared.

Which what this little article is about, anything smaller than 18nm is not economical to manufacture.  Not about the speed or anything.

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avatarI was actually referring to

Submitted by seinjunkie on Sun, 09/20/2009 - 8:56pm

I was actually referring to the debunking of its truth:

Myth: Moore's law is uncannily accurate. Fact: Moore's law is way off. If the original 12-month period had held true since 1965, today's chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors. The 24-month revision predicts 37 million. Actual progress: Intel's Prescott Pentium 4, a relatively economical chip, has 129 million transistors. 

 But very nice of you to call me an "R-tard" without bothering to understand it yourself. 

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