If you're not familiar with Moore's Law, it's the idea that computing speed will double roughly every two years due to factors such as smaller and smaller transistors being used in chips. That's great, but like with nearly anything else, there has to be a limit to the process:

If components are to continue shrinking, physicists must eventually code bits of information onto ever smaller particles. Smaller means faster in the microelectronic world, but physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University in Massachusetts, have slapped a speed limit on computing, no matter how small the components get.

Physicists estimate that we won't reach this limit until the 75 year mark from now. But others have suggested that it's actually far sooner, only 20 years away. Heck, I've heard five years at some point. Whatever the time frame is, I'm curious about is what the actual speed limit will wind up being. (Mind you, I'd love to see it hit during my lifetime, too. Just to know for sure.) [Live Science]

Photo by Intel

Now that is (or was) expected to halt at some point, meaning our computers and gadgets would start remaining the same size. Yep, no more "Honey, I Shrunk the Processors." But work by IBM could keep the sequels coming.

If you didn't know Intel's processors and transistors are about to hit 32 nanometers in size (fun fact: a single hair strand is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width). Now that is pretty darn small, but if we want things to get even smaller, like Zoolander phone small, it is said that the physical constraints in the silicon in these transistors can only go so tiny. Apparently, they have even been playing tricks with the silicon even since 90 nanometers.

The New York Times reports some seriously advanced solutions which are being worked on by Dr. Ross of IBM (not George Clooney's ER character who had the same name). FinFETs are one type of transistor and are the basis of 22-nanometer technology which we may see by 2012. These transistors are vertically tipped, offer greater density and better insulating properties. She is also concentrating on constructing FinFET and silicon nanowire switches in a whole new process.

It is a kind of nanofarming. Dr. Ross sprinkles gold particles as small as 10 nanometers in diameter on a substrate and then suffuses them in a silicon gas at a temperature of about 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the particles to become "supersaturated" with silicon from the gas, which will then precipitate into a solid, forming a wire that grows vertically.

Complicated and extremely intricate stuff which is all apparently riddled with significant challenges, but Dr. Ross and her IBM team have got to keep at it. It means the continuation of us getting thinner and smaller electronics in our hands (and lost in my bag). [The New York Times]

This would be fair, considering his company was about to announce a sudden 90% plunge in profits. So it's understandable that, when I asked him about Nvidia's recent coup, getting Apple to swap out Intel product for GeForce 9400M chipset, he said with more than a hint of disdain, "You're obviously a Mac user." Here's a guy who is used to making judgments, and doing it quickly.

But when I told him I also built my desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale chip, he reversed his decision. Laughing, he said, "You're alright for a kid that wears black Keds." This wasn't his first reference to my sneakers—they were Adidas, actually—and it wasn't his last either.

At 69, he is definitely one of the oldest guys running a powerhouse innovation company like Intel, and when he's sitting there in front of you, he conveys an attitude that he's seen it all. He hung up his labcoat for a tailored suit long ago, but talking to him, you can still tell that his degree from Stanford isn't some MBA, but a PhD in materials science. Nerdspeak flows easily out of his mouth, and he closes his eyes while calmly making a point, like a college professor. At the same, you get a sense of the agitation within. After all, he'll be the first to tell you that in business, he still lives by the mantra of his Intel CEO predecessor Andy Grove: "Only the paranoid survive."

In the end, I really liked the guy. He's tough but fair, like an Old Testament king. Here are excerpts from our conversation, chip guru to chip fanboy, about vanquishing your competition, the limitations of clock speed, the continuing rage of the multi-core race and how to keep paranoid in your golden years.

What's the endgame of the multi-core arms race? Is there one?
If everything works well, they continue to get Moore's Law from a compute power standpoint. [But] you need software solutions to go hand-in-hand with software solutions...There's a whole software paradigm shift that has to be happen.

How involved is Intel in the software side of making that happen?
Probably the best measure is that if look at the people we hire each year, we still hire more software engineers than hardware engineers.

Where do you see Larrabee, Intel's in-development, dedicated high-end GPU, taking you?
The fundamental issue is that performance has to come from something other than gigahertz... We've gotten to the limit we can, so you've got to do something else, which is multiple cores, and then it's either just partitioning solutions between cores of the same type or partitioning solutions between heterogeneous cores on the same chip.

You see, everybody's kind of looking at the same thing, which is, 'How do I mix and match a CPU- and a GPU-type core, or six of these and two of those, and how do you have the software solution to go hand-in-hand?'

So what do you think of the competition coming from Nvidia lately?
At least someone is making very verbal comments about the competition anyway.

Do you see Nvidia as more of a competitor than AMD? How do you see the competitive landscape now?
We still operate under the Andy Grove scenario that only the paranoid survive, so we tend to be paranoid about where competition comes from any direction. If you look at the Intel history, our major competitor over the years has been everybody from IBM to NEC to Sun to AMD to you-name-it. So the competition continually changes, just as the flavor of technology changes.

As visualization becomes more important—and visualization is key to what you and consumers want—then is it the CPU that's important, or the GPU, or what combination of the two and how do you get the best visualization? The competitive landscape changes daily. Nvidia is obviously more of a competitor today than they were five years ago. AMD is still a competitor.

Would you say the same competitive philosophy applies to the mobile space?
Two different areas, obviously. The netbook is really kind of a slimmed down laptop. The Atom processor takes us in that space nicely from a power/performance standpoint. Atom allows you to go down farther in this kind of fuzzy area in between netbooks, MIDs [mobile internet devices] and smartphones. The question there is, 'What does the consumer want?'

The issue is, 'What is the ultimate device in that space?' ...Is it gonna be an extension of the internet coming down, or there gonna be an upgrowth of the cellphone coming up?

Are you planning on playing more directly in phones, then?
Those MIDs look more and more like smartphones to me...All they need to do is shrink down a little bit and they're a damn good smartphone. They have the capability of being a full-internet-functionality smartphone as opposed to an ARM-based one—maybe it looks like the internet you're used to or, maybe it doesn't.

Intel and Microsoft "won" the PC Revolution. There's a computer on basically every office desk in the country. What's beyond that? Mobile, developing countries?
Well, it's a combination. There's an overriding trend toward mobility for convenience. We can shrink the capability down to put it in a mobile form factor, and the cost is not that much more than a desktop, point one. Point two, if you go to the emerging economies where you think that mobile might be lacking, really the only way to get good broadband connectivity in most of the emerging markets is not with wired connectivity or fixed point connectivity, it's gonna be broadband wireless and that facilitates mobile in emerging markets as well.

So where does that take Intel going in the next five years?
It's pushing things like broadband wireless, WiMax...It's broadband wireless capability, that's the connectivity part. It's mobility with more compute power and lower energy consumption to facilitate battery life and all that good stuff. And it's better graphics. That's kind of Larrabee and that whole push.

You've passed AMD on every CPU innovation that it had before you did, such as on-die memory controllers, focus on performance per watt, etc. How do you plan to stay ahead?
The basic way you stay ahead is that you have to set yourself with aggressive expectations. There's nothing in life that comes free. You're successful when you set your expectations high enough to beat the competition. And I think the best thing that we have going for us is...the Moore's Law deal.

As long as we basically don't lose sight of that, and continue to push all of our roadmaps, all of our product plans and such to follow along Gordon's law, then we have the opportunity to stay ahead. That doubling every 18 months or so is the sort of expectation level you have to set for yourself to be successful.

Would you consider that the guiding philosophy, the banner on the wall?
That's the roadmap! That is the roadmap we have. If you dissect a bit, you tend to find that the older you get, the more conservative you get typically and you kinda start to worry about Moore's Law not happening. But if you bring the bright young talent and say, 'Hey, bright young talent, we old guys made Moore's Law happen for 40 years, don't screw it up,' they're smart enough to figure it out.

The metal lens is the key: it's in fact a plasmonic lens, that achieves a smaller "focussed" spot of UV light than is possible with the diffraction limits of normal optics. The photoresist surface of the chip needs to be very close beneath the lens to work, hence the choice of the "flying head" arm—much like that in a conventional hard drive. This keeps the lens around 20nm above the silicon wafer, using aerodynamic forces between the spinning wafer and the head.

Why do we care about this? Conventional photolithography can achieve chip details down to a size of about 35nm, but with this technique the size could shrink to as small as 5nm. And it's fast, and doesn't require million-dollar lithography photomasks. Plus as well as denser, more powerful computer chips the technique could even be modified to create optical data storage systems with fantastic amounts of capacity. Clever stuff, and might keep Moore's law ticking over for a while yet. [Physorg]

By combining laser interference technology with a new "scanning beam" wafer technique, the team at the Space Nanotecnology Lab has demonstrated manufacturing of semiconductor wafers with 25nm detail. And it's easily extendable to 12nm. In the scanning technique, Doppler shifts affect the laser's ability to create accurate patterns, so the clever MIT guys synchronize the wafer under construction by oscillating the laser elements with 100Hz sound waves. Looks like that venerable old law will hold true for a while yet. [EETimes]

Intel Chips from 1971 to 2007:

Intel's History of the Transistor:

[Intel]

Press Release for 60th Anniversary:

INTEL MARKS 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE TRANSISTOR

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 10, 2007 - Intel Corporation on Dec. 16 celebrates the 60th anniversary of the transistor, the building block of today's digital world. Invented by Bell Labs and considered one of the most important inventions of the 20th century, transistors are found in many consumer electronics and are the fundamental component used to build computer chips, or the "brains" of the personal computer (PC).

Intel, the world's largest manufacturer of computer chips, has recently introduced its 45 nanometer (nm) next-generation family of quad-core processors. Called the biggest transistor advancement in 40 years by Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore, the processors are the first to use Intel's Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) formula for the hundreds of millions of transistors inside these processors. Introduced on Nov. 12 and continuing into the next few months, this latest innovation is enabling servers, everyday PCs and laptops to become smaller, faster, sleeker and more energy-efficient while also eliminating eco-unfriendly lead and, in 2008, halogen materials.

Guided by Moore's Law
On April 19, 1965 Electronics Magazine published a paper by Moore in which he made a prediction about the semiconductor industry that has become the stuff of legend. Known as Moore's Law, his prediction states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 2 years, enabling widespread proliferation of technology worldwide, and today it has become shorthand for rapid technological change.

Moore's Law not only predicts that computing technology will increase in value but at the same time would actually decrease in cost. The price of a transistor in Intel's newest chip family is about 1 millionth the average price of a transistor in 1968. If car prices had fallen at the same rate, a new car today would cost about one cent.

With its transistors turning on and off more than a trillion times per second, the Intel® Core™ Duo processor can complete close to a billion calculations in the blink of an eye or finish 4 million calculations in the time it takes a speeding bullet to travel one inch.1 And the average power of an Intel Core Duo processor is less than 1.1 watts, which is significantly less than many familiar household appliances, such as a 100W light bulb.

Smaller and faster chips made possible by Intel's technology advancements benefit consumers lives by enabling improved performance, longer battery life, and sleeker, quieter and more energy-efficient PCs and laptops. If engineers continue Moore's Law and succeed in continuing to reduce the size of the transistor while increasing the speed, the world could expect amazing new innovations and applications such as real-time language translation and facial recognition, as well as enabling cars that take verbal commands to a destination.

If you want to skip to why you should care, basically it means faster chips that run cooler and consume less power. (Think more cores—lots of 'em—and mobile devices.) It also means that Intel maintains a nine-month lead over everybody else, with their chips made with the new tech dropping later this year, while IBM's don't roll out til '08. – Matt Buchanan

P.S. Neither article is written very clearly, so I recommend reading both of them.

Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power [NYT]
Moore's Law seen extended in chip breakthrough [Reuters]
If seeing chip factories from the inside is your thing, Robby Scoble's got some videos here.

This proof of concept shows that it will probably be possible to use nanotech to dramatically increase processor speed, keeping Moore's law going a few years longer.

Nano circuit offers big promise [BBC News]

Those of you who did a spit-take when Gillette announced their five blade Fusion razor last year because you remembered The Onion predicting it would happen from the year before, you should appreciate that someone at The Economist not only wondered whether or not there was a Moore's Law for razor blades but actually worked on the graph you see to the right. If the (admittedly few) five data points we have hold, we should be shaving ourselves with fourteen blades by the 2100.

We'd be impressed except that by 2100 we expect hair removal to be taken care of automagically by nanobots as we shower. Who wants blades when you can have teeny tiny robots?

Shaving technology: The cutting edge [The Economist]