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NSF preparing for the demise of Moore's Law

By Agam Shah , IDG News Service , 02/13/2008
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In anticipation of Moore's Law becoming irrelevant in the next 10 to 20 years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wants funding for research that could lead to a replacement for current silicon technology.

The NSF last week requested US$20 million from the U.S. government for fiscal 2009 to start the "Science and Engineering Beyond Moore's Law" effort, which would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology.

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on silicon, and its attendant computational capability, doubles every 18 months.

Human and economic progress in the U.S. over the past 20 years has depended on an increasing ability to do information processing and computing, said Michael Foster, division director of computing and communication foundations at NSF. "If the current technological basis of that ends, we've got to find some way to replace it or we're going to stop moving forward."

The traditional way to improve transistor performance is to decrease the thickness of the gate oxide, or insulator that separates one part of the transistor from the other. The looming barrier is that transistors will be shrunk as small as possible for them to still work effectively, after which they may need to be replaced or somehow improved on, Foster said.

"In the kind-of near future -- in 8 to 10 years -- we will have reduced that gate oxide thickness to the point where it will no longer act as an effective insulator," Foster said. "I don't know of any other proposals to increase the performance of... [current] transistors, which is why we have to look at really radically new structures like transistors based on nanostructures."

Carbon nanotubes could provide a way to create smaller transistors, Foster said. Transistor performance is correlated to transistor size -- the smaller a transistor, the better it performs. "Carbon nanotubes give us the possibility of much smaller transistors than we can make right now," Foster said.

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