Chipmakers have predicted that they will continue to be able to boost the performance of silicon chips for the next fifteen years. However, the Semiconductor Industry Association trade group said in its 1999 technology roadmap that the speed of development might start to slow in five years, but would continue for ten more. Despite this SIA said that the industry would stay in sync with Moore’s Law – the prediction made by Intel chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore over thirty years ago that silicon chips would double in performance every 18 months.
By 2014, according to the SIA, microprocessors will run at clockspeeds of 3.6GHz. The fastest x86 processors available today from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices run at a little over 700MHz. And 15 years hence, chips will use around 64 billion transistors, compared to today’s 64 million.
The SIA is assuming that between now and 2014, solutions will be found to some tricky manufacturing problems, such as reducing transistor size and finding a replacement for Silicon Dioxide. Researchers at the University of California said that yesterday that they had developed a tiny new transistor (see separate story). Silicon Dioxide is used as an insulating layer in chips. However, as designs get smaller, the insulating layer gets thinner and will reach a point where it no longer performs its task. The SIA says that a number of companies are working on this problem and that it expects a viable alternative to be found within five years. In the longer term, chip companies are looking at completely changing the way chips are fabricated, working with alternative materials and radically different design ideas. For instance, Hewlett-Packard Co has a research project which is developing molecular chips based on synthetic material (CI No 3,706), called rotaxane, however, the work is not expected to be commercialized for at least 10 years. รก
