[EAS]Into Moore's Vortex

[pjk]

Subject:   Into Moore's Vortex

(from NewsScan Daily, 4 February 2002)

FASTER, FASTER: NO SLOWDOWN IN MOORE'S LAW
"Moore's Law" -- the remarkably accurate 1965 prediction by Intel 
co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would
double about every 18 months (thereby also roughly doubling the
chip's  computing speed) -- is truer than ever, with new evidence
suggesting that the computer industry will be able to further shrink
one dimension of modern processors (the "physical gate length," or
the space between two key  components in a solid-state transistor).
The result will be even-faster chips a few years from now, and one
example of the new chipmaking  environment is Intel's announcement of
a chip that has performed at up to 10 gigahertz speeds at room
temperature, the fastest performance yet for any microprocessor. (New
York Times 4 Feb 2002)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2002/02/04/technology/04CHIP.html
_____________________________________________________________________
This year's International Solid State Circuits Conference began in San
Francisco Feb. 3rd.

> Today, in the most advanced chip designs, the [gate length] space has
> shrunk to just 90 nanometers Ñ equivalent to about 360 atoms laid end
> to end.
> 
> Other research advances to be presented at the conference include a
> single-chip, solid-state gyroscope from Analog Devices and an
> all-electronic sensor array making it possible to do DNA analysis
> without optical components.

   --PJK