Comments on: iSuppli predicts 20nm is where we get off Moore’s curve http://insidehpc.com/2009/06/18/isuppli-predicts-20nm-is-where-we-get-off-moores-curve/ HPC News Without the Noise for Supercomputing Professionals | insideHPC Sun, 19 May 2013 10:46:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 By: Savage http://insidehpc.com/2009/06/18/isuppli-predicts-20nm-is-where-we-get-off-moores-curve/#comment-178139 Savage Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:30:29 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=5650#comment-178139 Don't worry, there will likely be a completely different kind of technology that beats the curve. When high technology was electrically actuated switches, they could never have imagined electronic components, let alone integrated circuits or microchips probably smaller than the heads of the bolts that held early computers together. Physicists pontificated the speed of sound was impossible to break, then Chuck Yeager broke it in the X-1 rocketship in 1947. Little did they know that only a few years later they would test and fly a true airplane, the SR-71 that cruised faster than a rifle bullet! Don’t worry, there will likely be a completely different kind of technology that beats the curve. When high technology was electrically actuated switches, they could never have imagined electronic components, let alone integrated circuits or microchips probably smaller than the heads of the bolts that held early computers together. Physicists pontificated the speed of sound was impossible to break, then Chuck Yeager broke it in the X-1 rocketship in 1947. Little did they know that only a few years later they would test and fly a true airplane, the SR-71 that cruised faster than a rifle bullet!

]]> By: Joe http://insidehpc.com/2009/06/18/isuppli-predicts-20nm-is-where-we-get-off-moores-curve/#comment-169977 Joe Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:24:07 +0000 http://insidehpc.com/?p=5650#comment-169977 Ignoring economic effects, there is a hard physical limit, which changes us from a "classical" or "semi-classical" physics regime, into a hard "quantum" regime. This is when a length scale of the semiconductor (width, depth, length, spacing) becomes comparable to the thermal de Broglie wavelength of a charge carrier (for an electron at room temperature, this is about 4.3nm or 43 Angstrom. Then our device physics will be significantly different than it is today. Different doesn't mean worse, there may be some very nice new devices we can build from this (a quantum ALU anyone?) where we leverage and embrace the quantum nature of the system. There is quite a bit of work going on in quantum computing. It would be interesting to see if it can be made practical. Note that we are at 45nm devices now, about 10x the de Broglie wavelength. 20nm devices are about 5x, so you should see a serious onset of the quantum regime happen below this. The charge carrier waves tend to interact with an exponential tail that looks something like exp(-1 x size / constant) where the size is the structure size or spacing, and the constant is a multiplicative factor times that de Broglie wavelength. If you get a bunch of "square" wires close enough together, you will get basically a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_in_a_one-dimensional_lattice_(periodic_potential)" rel="nofollow">Kronig-Penny</a> model, which is a homework problem for many an undergraduate physics student in their quantum mechanics class. We are getting nearer to this. Ignoring economic effects, there is a hard physical limit, which changes us from a “classical” or “semi-classical” physics regime, into a hard “quantum” regime. This is when a length scale of the semiconductor (width, depth, length, spacing) becomes comparable to the thermal de Broglie wavelength of a charge carrier (for an electron at room temperature, this is about 4.3nm or 43 Angstrom. Then our device physics will be significantly different than it is today. Different doesn’t mean worse, there may be some very nice new devices we can build from this (a quantum ALU anyone?) where we leverage and embrace the quantum nature of the system. There is quite a bit of work going on in quantum computing. It would be interesting to see if it can be made practical.

Note that we are at 45nm devices now, about 10x the de Broglie wavelength. 20nm devices are about 5x, so you should see a serious onset of the quantum regime happen below this. The charge carrier waves tend to interact with an exponential tail that looks something like exp(-1 x size / constant) where the size is the structure size or spacing, and the constant is a multiplicative factor times that de Broglie wavelength. If you get a bunch of “square” wires close enough together, you will get basically a Kronig-Penny model, which is a homework problem for many an undergraduate physics student in their quantum mechanics class. We are getting nearer to this.

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