Hi Andy
and thanks a lot for your hint to the article. Moore's law, always a controversy discussion. Esp. after his revision to 2 pow 1.8 in 1969...
Working in the field of hardware fault tolerance and chip design I gain more and more comfort in Moores law. Accepting that it roots are in the late 60's and it's truth up to the point in time now it's worthwile mentioning.
Things changing. Almost 40 years ago transistors usually where bipolar.
Fast and energy hungry..
Early 70's CMOS came up and the thickness of the gate insulation governs the speed. I remember vividly a symposium in spain regarding the quantum ballistic behaviour of electrons in semiconductors. They stated a max switching freq. of 800 MHz, it was around 1996. ;D
Not a year later they came up with 12 Angstroem alowing 1.2 GHz ;D
The question today, my opion, is how to connect billions of transistors within an die to keep up Moore's law. Interconnection is the real challenge today, isn't it? How to reduce permeability? How to deal with dispersion?
I really love microelectronics because it involves so much mechanical engineering, esp. cooling. 1/4 of an inch sqaured of electronics and an awful lot of cooling equipment.
I really appreciated your posting
Peter