Moore's Law

Gordon Moore's Law, according to WIkipedia and TechWorld, basically states that “the complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”It was orginally published in Electronics Magazine in 1965. Moore stated that this trend would very likely continue at this rate for at least 10 years and possibly even longer after that. However, it seems that this trend cannot last forever.

In a TechWorld article, Moore himself states that "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens. In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far - but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions."

Obviously, there's only so much we can do. Making a transistor that is smaller than the size of an atom is impossible with our current technologies. Eventually everything has to cap out. However, it is possible to create larger chips to hold more transistors. This eliminates trying to make a transistor as small as possible.

I strongly agree with Moore's comments, but given the advances in technology so far, I believe that an alternate solution can be found. It just takes some time.