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Anyone who has anything to do withresearch and development of electronics has heard of the Moore’s Law. This isan empirical law named after Intel co-founder Gordon E.Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that thenumber of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from theinvention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that thetrend would continue "for at least tenyears". His prediction has proved to be uncannilyaccurate and still valid, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductorindustry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development (according toWikipedia).

The US National Science foundation in aposition paper has considered “Science andEngineering Beyond Moore’s Law (SEBML)” as a national goal. http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2012/pdf/41_fy2012.pdf

https://www.nsf.gov/attachments/123079/public/MPSAC_Science_and_Engineering_Beyond_Moore's_Law_White_Paper.pdf

And“IEEE Explore” has a special invited paper with the same title

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=06186749.It is fascinating reading. I reproduce the abstract below to give readers ataste of the future.

Thispaper describes Moore’s law for CMOS technology, examines its limits, and considerssome of the possible future pathways for both CMOS and successor technologieswith objective of encouraging some radical rethinking for the development ofpossible future information processing technologies.

ByRalph K. Cavin, III, Life Fellow IEEE, Paolo Lugli, Fellow IEEE, and Victor V.Zhirnov

ABSTRACT | In this paper, the historical effects and benefits of Moore’s lawfor semiconductor technologies are reviewed, and it is offered that the rapidlearning curve obtained to the benefit of society by feature size scaling mightbe continued in several

differentways. The problem is that as features approach the range of a few nanometers,electron-based devices depart radically from the ideal switch and, in fact,become very leaky in the OFF state. It is argued that there are some short-termsolutions involving more highly parallel manufacturing, increased designefficiency, and lower cost packaging technologies that could continue the steeplearning curve for cost reductions that have historically been achieved viaMoore’s Law scaling. Another alternative might be to increase chip functionalityby integrating devices that offer broadened chip

functionalityincluding, e.g., sensors, energy sources, oscillators, etc. A third alternativewould be to invent an entirely new information processing state variable basedon different physics, using electron spin, magnetic dipoles, photons, etc.,

toimprove the performance and reduce switching energy for devices whose smallestfeatures are on the order of a few nanometers. Each of these alternatives isbeing actively explored and an overview of each strategy and progress to dateis givenin the paper. A final alternative offered in the paper is to learn frominformation processing examples in nature, specifically in living systems. An E.colicell of about one cubic micrometer volume is shown to be an incredibly powerfuland energy-efficient information processor relative to the performance of anend-of-scaling silicon processor of the same volume. The paper concludes bypointing out some of the crucial differences between E.coli informationprocessing and conventional approaches with the hope technologies can be inventedusing the hints offered by biosystems.