THE END IS NEAR!

   We are told that "change is good".   But change is good or bad depending on your point of view.  If we change the Senate from Democrat control to Republican control,  one third of the country will be happy while another third will be upset (the other third doesn't give a crap... but that's another blog for another time).

   The issue that I am about to discuss will of course make some people angry or scared, but for most of our world it will be welcomed news.  That news is that "Moore's Law" is coming to an end.

   What's Moore's Law?

   ML is not really a "law" like that of the "Law of Gravity" or the "Laws of Motion".  It's actually more of a prediction than anything else.   It was first created by Gordon Moore who was a co-founder of Intel Corporation.  He predicted that the number of transistors put on a chip would double every 2 years and for the past 45 years its been very accurate and is the main driver behind all the technological advancement of the last 50 years and because it was so accurate of a prediction for so long it had the appearance of a law of nature.

   First,  to those are not aware of what it means to double something every 2 years.  Let me put it this way.   Let's assume you start with 1 penny and we double your savings every 2 years...

As you can see from the table, doubling your savings every 2 years goes up to 4.2 billion dollars by the time you are ready to retire (if you started this when you were a baby).  The number get very large, very quickly.   This expansion of the technological-universe is the driving force behind you being able to play 3D games, or watch full-length HD movies, take pictures and video, get directions and find just about anything you want on a device smaller than a pack  of playing cards.

   Since working at Intel I have seen many doublings due to Moore's Law (12 in fact ... and counting).  When I first started working at Intel the i486 was the new processor on the block and it was the first 1 MILLION transistor part in existence and was manufactured using 800nm (thats' 800 billionths of a meter) technology.  Today, using our 14nm (that's 14 billionths of a meter) we could put approximately 3300 i486 on a single chip.   Imagine that!  Over 3000 computers (which would take fill a large room) on a single piece of silicon the size of a postage-stamp. 

    Many people take data like this an extrapolate far into the future and try to imagine the possibilities.  But the world is not always that predictable in truth and the same holds true for Moore's law as well.   Take for example the size of a single silicon atom.  According to Wikipedia, the Van Der Waals radius 210pm or .210nm.   Therefore current transistors are approximately 66 (14/0.210) atoms wide.  For transistors to operate properly they MUST stop electrons from moving through them when their gate-voltage is off.  However at about 1-3nm, a quantum effect called "quantum tunneling" occurs which allows electrons to move from one side of a barrier to another without going through it.