JC, Don,
New SIA roadmap issued today indicates that CYMI will likely have at least another 10 years of life...
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For example, the report predicts that chip makers will exhaust conventional lithography, the process of printing circuit designs on silicon wafers, as early as 2006. Right now, the smallest features on chips that companies can efficiently create are 0.25 microns in width, or 1/400th as wide as a human hair. At the current rate of progress, the industry by 2006 will be approaching features that are 0.1 microns wide, beyond the reach of existing lithography tools.
'The Most Pressing Problem'
So far, there are four or five possible ways to make chips with such small features, but none of them is economical. "That is probably the most pressing problem facing us," Mr. Glaze said.
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Despite the many challenges, SIA officials said they were optimistic that chip makers can find ways to stay on track with Moore's Law, the observation by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore that chip performance roughly doubles every 18 months while costs stay constant.
By 2012, the SIA's experts concluded, manufacturers should be able to put 1.4 billion transistors on a thumbnail-size microprocessor, which will operate at a speed of 2,700 megahertz. Memory chips will hold as much as 275 billion bits of data. By contrast, Intel's current Pentium II microprocessors have 7.5 million transistors and run at 300 megahertz, while the most popular memory chips only store about 16 million bits of data.
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Whole story is available at:
interactive.wsj.com |
