Posted 10/14/2009 at 09:33:02am

The reason they are doing this is because at somewhere around 10nm thick, silicon technology will become completely unstable.  At this thickness you can no longer keep track of the electrons, which would make it short circuit.  Thus, they are trying to go at a slow pace down the line, because eventially silicon technology will hit its max, and if they hit their max sooner than later without new technology to boot they'd be screwed.  And, we'd be stuck on a technological plateau.  So, this pace even though its still going more rapidly than our development in new technologies, is sort of buying time for the development of a new form.  Such as, quantum computing, or maybe even dna computing.