Moore's Law

The seemingly unshakeable accuracy of Moore's law - which states that the speed of computers; as measured by the number of transistors that can be placed on a single chip, will double every year or two - has been credited with being the engine of the electronics revolution, and is regarded as the premier example of a self-fulfilling prophecy and technological trajectory in both the academic and popular press. Although many factors have kept Moore's law as an industry benchmark, it is the entry of foreign competition that seems to have played a critical role in maintaining the pace of Moore's law in the early VLSI transition. Many different kinds of chips used many competing logic families. DRAMs and microprocessors became critical to the semiconductor industry, yet were unknown during the original formulation of Moore's law

Les promesses des technosciences contemporaines s’appuient sur les success stories de celles qui façonnent actuellement l’économie et la société. La Loi de Moore, fonction exponentielle qui décrit et prédit la cadence de miniaturisation et de réduction des coûts des composants électroniques depuis un demi-siècle, constitue un de ces récits. Ce chapitre interroge la Loi de Moore comme matrice historique du régime actuel de l’économie des promesses technoscientifiques. Devenue métaphore du progrès technique en général, la Loi de Moore délimite le périmètre de ce qui, des technosciences, peut être interrogé et discuté. Parce qu’elle trace un cadre temporel pour l’innovation, sa construction même est hors-cadre, et relève du non négociable.En donnant à voir la fabrique de ce récit, ce chapitre entend construire et instruire une position critique générale sur l’économie des promesses technoscientifiques actuelles. Cette critique porte moins sur la faisabilité de ces promesses (sur leur caractère spéculatif, non crédible, non tenable) que sur leur désirabilité. La Loi de Moore montre en effet que ces promesses peuvent devenir crédibles, réalisables, tenables – mais à quel prix ?

According to the Moore’s law, the number of transistor should be doubled every 18 to 24 months. The main factors of increasing the number of transistor are: a density and a die size. Each of them has a serious physical limitation; the first one “density” may be reached “Zero” after few years, which causes limitation in performance and speed of a microprocessor, the second one “die size” cannot be increased every 2 years, it must be fixed for several years, otherwise it will affect the economical side. This article aims to increase the number of transistors, which increase the performance and the speed of the microprocessor without or with a little bit increasing the die size, by constructing a two-layer crystal square for transistors, which allows increasing the number of transistors two additional times. By applying the new approach the number of transistors in a single chip will be approximately doubled every 24 months according to Moore’s Law without changing rapidly the size of a chip (length and width), only the height of a chip must be changed for putting the two layers.

We report on four-input NAND and NOR gates using only two 7nm Schottky-Barrier (SB) independent-gate FinFETs transistors that take advantage of gate workfunction engineering (WFE). Careful optimization of workfunctions at the source/drain contacts as well as two independent gates of the SB-FinFETs provide unprecedented control of the threshold in the ambipolar device operation. It is used in this work to tailor 4-input NAND and NOR functionalities out of only two transistors (2T), utilizing only two different metal workfunctions in a given gate. Correct operation of multi-input gates for supply voltages as low as VDD = 0.5V has been verified using 2D TCAD circuit simulations. Switching performance of the proposed 4-input gates indicate that they have 45% reduction in PDP figures as compared to the conventional 16T FinFET counterparts, which is due to substantially lower power dissipation at the expense of slower transitions. A JK Flip-Flop circuit is designed using the proposed four-input NAND gate that illustrates its advantages for the logic operation.

This article shows how new forms of electronic products and services become economically feasible and thus candidates for commercialization and creative destruction as improvements in standard electronic components such as microprocessors, memory, and displays occur. Unlike the predominant viewpoint in which commercialization is reached, as advances in science facilitate design changes that enable improvements in performance and cost, most new forms of electronic products and services are not invented in a scientific sense, and the cost and performance of them are primarily driven by improvements in standard components. They become candidates for commercialization, as the cost and performance of standard components reach the levels necessary for the final products and services to have the required levels of performance and cost. This suggests that when managers, policy makers, engineers, and entrepreneurs consider the choice and timing of commercializing new electronic products and services, they should understand the composition of new technologies, the impact of components on a technology's cost, performance and design, and the rates of improvement in the components.

Felieton opisuje, jakie wady miała technika montowania układów elektronicznych z oddzielnych elementów i jak doszło do zbudowania pierwszego układu scalonego, za którego konstrukcję Jack Kilby otrzymał Nagrodę Nobla. Dalej omówiona jest ewolucja układów scalonych aż do wynalezienia mikroprocesora i rozwój mikrokomputerów spowodowany tym wynalazkiem.

The concept of a Singularity as described in Ray Kurzweil’s book
cannot happen for a number of reasons. One reason is that all natural growth processes that follow exponential patterns eventually reveal themselves to be following S-curves thus excluding runaway situations. The remaining growth potential from Kurzweil’s ‘‘knee’’, which could be approximated as the moment when an S-curve pattern begins deviating from the corresponding exponential, is a factor of only one order of magnitude greater than the growth already achieved. A second reason is that there is already evidence of a slowdown in some important trends. The growth pattern of the U.S. GDP is no longer exponential. Had Kurzweil been more rigorous in his fitting procedures, he would have recognized it. Moore’s law and the Microsoft Windows operating systems are both approaching end-of-life limits. The Internet rush has also ended—for the time being—as the number of users stopped growing; in the western world because of saturation and in the underdeveloped countries because infrastructures, education, and the standard of living there are not yet up to speed. A third reason is that society is capable of auto-regulating runaway trends as was the case with deadly car accidents, the AIDS threat, and rampant overpopulation. This control goes beyond government decisions and conscious intervention. Environmentalists who fought nuclear energy in the 1980s, may have been reacting only to nuclear energy’s excessive rate of growth, not nuclear energy per se, which is making a comeback now. What may happen instead of a Singularity is that the rate of change soon begins slowing down The exponential pattern of change witnessed up to now dictates more milestone events during year 2025 than witnessed throughout the entire 20th century! But such events are already overdue today. If, on the other hand, the change growth pattern has indeed been following an S-curve, then the rate of change is about to enter a declining trajectory; the baby boom generation will have witnessed more change during their lives than anyone else before or after them.

An extensive analysis of sub-10 nm logic building blocks utilizing ultra-compact logic gates based on recently proposed gate workfunction engineering (WFE) approach is provided. WFE sets the workfunction in the contacts as well as two independent gates of an ambipolar Schottky-Barrier (SB) FinFET to alter the threshold of two channels, as a unique leverage to modify the logic functionality out of a single transistor. Thus, a single transistor (1T) CMOS pass-gate, 2T NAND and NOR gates as well as 3T or 4T XOR gates with substantial reduction in overall area (50%) and power (up to ×10) dissipa-tion can be implemented. To harness this potential and illustrate the capabilities of these compact ambipolar transistors, novel logic building blocks including 6T multiplexer, 8T full-adder, 4T latch, 6T D-type flip-flop and 4T and-or-invert (AOI) gates are developed. Besides the logic verification using 7 nm devices, dynamic performance of the proposed logic circuits are also analyzed. The comparative simulation study shows that WFE in independent-gate SB-FinFETs can lead to absolutely minimalist CMOS logic blocks without significant degradation to overall power-delay product (PDP) performance.

This philosophical paper explores the relation between modern scientific simulations and the future of the universe. We argue that a simulation of an entire universe will result from future scientific activity. This requires us to tackle the challenge of simulating open-ended evolution at all levels in a single simulation. The simulation should encompass not only biological evolution, but also physical evolution (a level below) and cultural evolution (a level above). The simulation would allow us to probe what would happen if we would “replay the tape of the universe” with the same or different laws and initial conditions. We also distinguish between real-world and artificial-world modelling. Assuming that intelligent life could indeed simulate an entire universe, this leads to two tentative hypotheses. Some authors have argued that we may already be in a simulation run by an intelligent entity. Or, if such a simulation could be made real, this would lead to the production of a new universe. This last direction is argued with a careful speculative philosophical approach, emphasizing the imperative to find a solution to the heat death problem in cosmology. The reader is invited to consult Annex 1 for an overview of the logical structure of this paper.

Keywords: far future, future of science, ALife, simulation, realization, cosmology, heat death, fine-tuning, physical eschatology, cosmological natural selection, cosmological artificial selection, artificial cosmogenesis, selfish biocosm hypothesis, meduso-anthropic principle, developmental singularity hypothesis, role of intelligent life.

Owing to the fact that MOSFETs can be effortlessly assimilated into ICs, they have become the heart of the growing semiconductor industry. The need to procure low power dissipation, high operating speed and small size requires the scaling down of these devices. This fully serves the Moore's Law. But scaling down comes with its own drawbacks which can be substantiated as the Short Channel Effect. The working of the device deteriorates owing to SCE. In this paper, the problems of device downsizing as well as how the use of SED based devices prove to be a better solution to device downsizing has been presented. As such the study of Short Channel effects as well as the issues associated with a nanoMOSFET is provided. The study of the properties of several Quantum dot materials and how to choose the best material depending on the observation of clear Coulomb blockade is done. Specifically, a study of a graphene single electron transistor is reviewed. Also a theoretical explanation to a model designed to tune the movement of electrons with the help of a quantum wire has been presented.

The scalability of routing protocols has been a prominent topic to increasing the lifetime of a mobile ad hoc network. One of the underlying features behind scalable protocols is the localised nature of path maintenance. However, nodes’ data communications are excluded, despite being the main purpose of the routing protocols. SAMPCAN is a novel caching technique that can be applied to numerous applications of the client-server interaction model for an optimised storage and transmission of data. SAMPCAN uses a subsampling method that can be applied to two data types, mainly (1) XML document, and (2) Image. This novel method promotes the locality of nodes cooperation and interactions to fulfil requests of neighbouring nodes. In this paper, the application of SAMPCAN is discussed for the scalability and increased lifetime of mobile ad hoc networks.

In combinational logic circuits, half adder plays an important role in computation of arithmetic units. As far as digital electronics is concerned, high processing adders have significant contribution in total delay and power of the system. This paper presents the comparison between the rise time and fall time obtained at the sum and carry outputs of the half adder deigned by the using simple interconnects, designed by using graphene nanoribbon (GNR) interconnects and also the half adders simulated using FinFET drivers and GNR interconnects.

This presentation summarizes the contents and includes some of the illustrations from a hypertext book that is nearing completion that hopefully will be ready for publication before the end of 2012. In the mean time, the author would like to invite some readers to test what has been written so far in aid of substantially improving the finished project.

The hypertext book explores the nature of knowledge and its evolution in simple organisms, multicellular organisms, people, biological species and socio-technical organizations. A major focus is to elucidate and explain the linkages between revolutions in human and organizational cognition and revolutionary technologies for managing persistent human and organizational knowledge forming the contents of books, libraries, computer memories, etc.

I lead readers across many disciplinary fields ranging from epistemology, thermal physics, history and evolutionary biology to theories of organizations and societies and some practical considerations as to how they can be managed. This expedition explores revolutions in technologies, cognition and even concepts of what it means to be living. Because I have mapped the terrain, I can highlight and explain pitfalls that would otherwise impede understanding as we travel through historical time and across disciplinary borders.

Pitfalls exist because each discipline crossed along the path has its own worldview and theory-laden language. Thomas Kuhn called these domain-specific thinking patterns paradigms. His (1970) book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions provides some clues as to how to develop a metalanguage allowing us to consider the different worldviews without becoming metaphysical or irrational. In our exploration, I try to minimize paradigmatic confusions by using a fugal development, starting with simple and relatively mundane themes and then elaborating them through a series of variations and episodes crossing different disciplinary domains to reach what I hope will be a climax of understanding.

The narrative of the expedition is at least partially autobiographical. By describing my own path to develop the insights presented here, I hope readers will find it easier to follow in my footsteps than they would when confronted with what might seem to be a chaotic landscape of incommensurable paradigmatic worlds.

For example, knowledge workers using different productivity tools often become so heatedly involved in irrational arguments about which tools are best, that bystanders call such discussions "holy wars"1. This is symptomatic of historically unprecedented cognitive and technological revolutions that fundamentally change the nature of humanity. Such revolutions profoundly affect everyone. To explain what is behind these holy wars and their existence, I weave together a number of disparate themes I have encountered in my own life and experience, from observing revolutions in text processing technology, evolutionary biology and genetics, history and philosophy of science, military affairs, and technical writing and knowledge management in large organizations. Given that these revolutions collectively amount to a new Renaissance, I think it is appropriate to base the development of my ideas on one of the greatest cognitive artifacts of the last Renaissance - the fugue.

My SUBJECT explores theoretical foundations of knowledge and its growth: based on Karl Popper's evolutionary epistemology, best expressed for our purposes here in his books "Objective Knowledge" (1972) and “Knowledge and the Body-Mind Problem” (1994), and the nature of scientific revolutions as described by Thomas Kuhn together with some concepts of evolutionary adaptation to elucidate some fundamental ideas about when evolutionary change becomes revolution. Eleven critical revolutions in human history are reviewed, each of which triggered major grade shifts in the human species' ecological role in nature. Five revolutions are based on the invention of new kinds of technology. The other six are cognitive – involving roles of technology in fundamental changes in the way information is processed into knowledge.

My COUNTER SUBJECT deals with concepts originating in the disparate arenas of evolutionary biology, military affairs and information theory to explore categories of information along independent dimensions of quantity and epistemic quality as iterated evolutionary processes cybernetically transform data into power. The late Col. John Boyd's (1996) (O)bserve, (O)rient, (D)ecide and (A)ct adaptive feedback concept (the "OODA loop") is presented as a generic cybernetic process for generating evolutionary and revolutionary change in complex adaptive systems, ranging from individual organisms to competing corporations and warring states. Such adaptive changes are a form of knowledge in their own right.

EPISODE 1 reviews some ideas on how the invention of writing, books and the printing press enhanced and enabled the major conceptual revolutions of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

EPISODE 2 follows the invention of and revolutionary growth of computer technology in my lifetime, to consider the magnitude and unprecedented speed of the microelectronics revolution and some of what this implies for processing, data, information and knowledge.

EPISODE 3 considers the inventions and revolutions in computer-based "productivity" applications for individual use and their roles in on-going cognitive revolutions in the way people generate and use knowledge. Word processing, spreadsheets and relational databases quantitatively extend human cognition and represent evolutionary changes in human capabilities. Structured authoring, indexing and retrieval systems, the World Wide Web and knowledge management applications revolutionize, automate and add epistemic quality to cognitive processes that were purely human activities until the last couple of decades. Over the last half of my lifetime since the growth of the “personal” computer three decades ago, these tools have given people “post-human” cognitive abilities - orders of magnitude beyond anything conceivable to previous generations outside science fiction.

INTERLUDE. However, before we can fully understand the impacts of the revolutions in cognitive technolgies on human society and organizations, we need to consider the fundamental interactions of life and knowledge. The concept of autopoiesis (from the Greek “self” “production”) as a formal definition as to what it means to be living, developed initially by Humberto Maturana and Franscisco Varela in the 1970’s, summarized in their 1980 book, is introduced at this point. I argue that knowledge and autopoiesis are intertwined to the extent that one cannot exist without the other and show that autopoietic organization can emerge at several levels of complexity. These levels minimally include individual living cells, autopoietic organisms comprised of interacting cells, and autopoietic social organizations such as companies and other human enterprises comprised of interacting organisms such as people.

EPISODE 4 explores the early impacts of social and cloud computing technologies that have come to prominence since around 2008 to fuel the emergence of what may be called socio-technical organizations. The spread of these newest technologies and the profound ways in which they extend the cognitive abilities of humans and their organizations again changes the nature of people and their organized social interactions.

EPISODE 5 explores the impact of technological revolutions on the acquisition and management of organizational knowledge. Extending concepts of knowledge to organizations requires a deeper theory of knowledge and organization as developed in the Interlude. Development of the themes in this episode owes much to the deep philosophy and science underlying Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge, Boyd’s OODA loop, autopoiesis, evolutionary economics, and hierarchically complex dynamic systems, as developed in the Interlude. It follows from these discussions that many businesses and organizations are living entities in their own rights and have cognitive capabilities that transcend the sum of their individual human members. Biology offers much more than just a metaphor for understanding how organizations work and compete. Organizational entities build objective knowledge to inform their adaptation to changing environments. Knowledge management tools facilitate conscious control over organizational cognition. Organizational managers need to understand and merge both Popperian and Polanyian epistemologies into an evolutionary epistemology to maximize their benefits from revolutionary technologies. Some practical examples of how cognitive applications can change the way organizations work are provided.

A CADENZA explores how a number of issues arising from the episodes affect the nature of knowledge and its impacts on individuals, organizations and society who need to use knowledge in a competitive environment.

A brief CODA considers the future. Is there a sting in the tale? Are the current revolutions a point of inflection in a logistic growth (sigmoid) curve or are we rising along a true evolutionary singularity (or spike) as some would claim?

The Moore's law (ML) is one of many empirical expressions that is used to characterize natural and artificial phenomena. The ML addresses technological progress and is expected to predict future trends. Yet, the " art " of predicting is often confused with the accurate fitting of trendlines to past events. Presently, data-series of multiple sources are available for scientific and computational processing. The data can be described by means of mathematical expressions that, in some cases, follow simple expressions and empirical laws. However, the extrapolation toward the future is considered with skepticism by the scientific community, particularly in the case of phenomena involving complex behavior. This paper addresses these issues in the light of entropy and pseudo-state space. The statistical and dynamical techniques lead to a more assertive perspective on the adoption of a given candidate law.

Nanoelectronics based on carbon nanotubes and organic molecules as the conducting material has been receiving increasing attention as an alternative to silicon CMOS based computing technology. These new device technologies require development of novel circuits and architectures to be technically feasible and economically viable. We provide an overview of this subject along with opportunities and challenges.