Sunday 9 December 2012

The End of Moore’s Law..

 

Computing is getting faster by the day. Physicists predict Moore’s law is going to come to an end as early as 2020. This is primarily because when Moore’s law was first coined in the 1965’s, The scientist Gordon E. Moore had considered cramming more components into IC’s (Integrated Circuits) and thus giving an average doubling speed of 18 months. i.e Raw computing power doubles up every 18 months. Nano-Technology advances makes it possible to cram more transistors into the same space that existed 18 months ago., thus making computing power to double every 18 months..This also means that machines get leaner and meaner by the day. Now, as this process continues to happen, this integration brings about a huge leap in electronics pushing science to its limits every day. Nanotechnology will soon get us to a point in time where transistors are 5 atoms wide. Theoretical Physicist Michio Kaku [ Physics of the Future, Michio Kaku] argues that laws of physics are going to change the way the computing is going to be done again. By about 2020, transistors are going to become so small that quantum theory or atomic physics will take over.

Now, Here’s why.

When we get to the juncture of building transistors which are 5 atoms wide, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes into play, which states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle, which means we cannot know where an electron is, and therefore cannot be confined to a wire causing a circuit to short circuit. Interesting enough, New paradigms of quantum computing are going to give way to a whole new world of developing IC’s..[More Here]. The challenge that researchers are facing now is to build a single atom transistor as a fundamental quantum computer that works by controlling the electrons and quantum information or qubits.

Whilst people at Intel think that the end of Moore’s law is at least 10 years away, Some scientists find it hard to even believe that this would be ever possible. We shall soon find out the answer..

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