What Transistors Will Look Like at 5nm
<i>“My current assumption is that 5nm will happen, but it won’t hit high-volume manufacturing until after 2020,” said Bob Johnson, an analyst at Gartner. “If I were to guess, I’d say 2021 to 2022.&quot; ... In R&amp;D, chipmakers are also looking at 3nm and beyond, although it’s unclear if these nodes will ever happen.</i><p>What this all seems to be pointing to is that, in all likelihood, the &quot;party&quot; will be over within the next 3 to 6 years. It seems to me like there is an insufficient level of panic happening in the world over this issue (the imminent end of Moore&#x27;s Law after 30+ years of non-stop exponential growth). Moore&#x27;s Law was a massive, earth-shattering, 30+ year continuous exponential curve, that we all have been riding. I think the collapse of this curve could have serious implications for more than just chip designers and manufacturers. In my view, some groups that seem over-exposed and under-concerned are the software and startup industries.<p>For the past 30+ years, the market has seen better&#x2F;smaller&#x2F;bigger&#x2F;faster silicon computing devices arriving with unrelenting regularity. Now that will suddenly stop with one final, ultimate silicon product generation. After which, it sounds like we don&#x27;t get faster or cheaper CPUs, or bigger CPU caches, or more CPU cores, or more RAM, or better or cheaper GPUs, or bigger or cheaper SSDs, or better&#x2F;cheaper LED lights or OLED screens, or better&#x2F;smaller&#x2F;faster&#x2F;cheaper smart phones&#x2F;tablets&#x2F;digital cameras&#x2F;sensors&#x2F;broadband networking, etc? So the whole show just stops, like a high-speed train hitting a wall. And, by all credible accounts, this cataclysmic event is scheduled to occur within the next 3-6 years (barring some unforeseen, miraculous scientific revolution)!?<p>Once that happens, all computer technology seems destined to a fate similar to many other commoditized, industrial age technologies. A famous example is the design and performance of commercial aircraft, which has not fundamentally changed in nearly a century. Another example is steel manufacturing - nothing about the cost or other performance dimensions of steel have  changed since the industrial revolution. Steel is now a base commodity, and no one is waiting to upgrade all of their steel structures to some next generation steel alloy that will justify the massive expense of a complete &quot;hardware upgrade.&quot; Other examples include electro-chemical batteries, internal combustion engines, rockets, etc.<p>If this truly is an end-game within the next 4-6 years, then there will be a few niche, interesting areas to eke out performance gains within (let&#x27;s say) the next 20 to 30 years (e.g. through specialized  hardware designs and new software optimizations), but these gains seem to be very different from the economic miracle of the endless PC&#x2F;server&#x2F;smartphone&#x2F;software upgrade cycle that everyone has become so accustomed to. No such &quot;eke out optimizations&quot; will be able to compensate for the massive, negative economic impact of Moore&#x27;s Law ending, considering that our global economy seem to be fundamentally dependent on technology consumption cycles stemming from Moore&#x27;s Law.<p>This situation reminds me of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, where US sub-prime residential real estate prices had started falling in 2006 but everyone kept on ignoring the problem and hoping that it would just go away. It also reminds me of global warming, where the consequences are dire, and there is no solution in sight, but everyone is hoping that some new fundamental scientific discovery will revolutionize the energy industry. It <i>could</i> happen ... we could possibly discover a fundamentally new energy technology that replaces conventional fossil fuels, electro-chemical batteries, etc. And we <i>could</i> possibly discover a fundamentally new science that replaces &quot;Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor (CMOS)&quot; silicon technology. On the other hand, perhaps the laws of physics do not admit such a possibility? Or worse, even if it is physically possible, what if our global socio-economic system should collapse long before we are able to fund the necessary discovery? For example, is it possible that Moore&#x27;s Law stalling within the next 5-10 years could trigger a financial crisis so massive that it economically ends Moore&#x27;s Law for good, before the research can be funded to solve the problem?