Has Moore's Law hit the speed limit?

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 13 June 2006 20:47

Business IT - Technology

A New Zealand academic says that, for the past two years, there has been no improvement in chip speeds.  However, an Intel briefing in the run up to a major chip-technology conference in Honolulu this week has conjured up possibilities of much faster and more powerful chips and apparently confirming the continuing progress forecast by Moore's Law 40 years ago.
In an article in New Zealand's Waikato Times newspaper, professor John Cleary, of the Waikato University computer science department, wrote: "In October 2004 there was a quiet revolution in computing. It was so quiet you may be forgiven if you didn't notice it... At the end of 2004 [Intel] discovered that one half of Moore's law ceased to work, the bit about the speed always increasing. It didn't do it slowly. It just stopped. The fastest chips in the world now run at a little less than 4GHz and there is no sign that anyone will ever produce chips that run any faster."

According to Cleary, "It wasn't just Intel either. All the other major chip manufacturers quietly closed down projects or missed announcements about expected speed increases."

However in a press briefing in the run up to the Honolulu conference, the 2006 VSLI Symposia on technology and circuits, Intel is reported to have unveiled more details of a technology it first revealed that it was working on back in 2002, so called trigate transistors.

A particularly attractive aspect of this technology is said to be its ability to reduce power 'leakage' in chips. As chips become smaller this increases, generating heat which must be dissipated and which reduces battery life in portable devices.

Intel now claims to have demonstrated tri-gate transistors and Mike Mayberry, director of Intel components research, will present a paper "Tri-Gate Transistor Architecture with high-K gate Dielectrics, Metal Gates and Strain Engineering," at the VSLI symposium.

Reporting on the briefing, Electronic News said that by combining a number of techniques, Intel had been able to realise a 45 percent increase in speed or a 50 times reduction in off-current, equating to a 35 percent reduction in total power consumption at constant speed.