From: Ken Huck (kenhuck@jps.net)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 17:23:37 MDT
Hal wrote
>We've been riding the Moore's Law wave for a long time, maybe even a
>century by some definitions. But slashdot points today at an article
>in EE Times indicating that the current technology is going to hit the
>wall in about ten years.
I would like to know what readers think is driving Moore's law to
continue over the next 30 to 60 months.
As I understand it as the chip features shrink the fabs get more
expensive to build and the number of fabs built to operate at that
feature size decreases. CMOS feature size reduction may be slowed more
by diminishing returns on capital rather than size limitations on the
smallest functional CMOS transistor.
My guess is that the largest growth market for microelectronic devices
today is the developing world. I heard that more than half of the people
alive today have never made a telephone call. To serve this huge market
I think we need to make basic computation more affordable rather than
faster. For example the market for a US$25 solor powered cellphone
connected to a US$1000 self contained, user installable, wireless base/
relay station seems virtually unlimited compared to the market for 5Gz CPU's.
Even though my work on computers is revenue generating I resist paying
more than US$100 for a perepherial or US$400 for a CPU. However, I could
be drawn back to the days of US$ 2500 systems for an interperable, broad
band, video conferencing system (with low recuring costs). However
teleconferencing seems to be bottlenecked on standards and networking
issues rather than processing/computation capacity.
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