What is Moore's Law

One of the things we observe today is, electronic things are getting smaller and smaller. Well, maybe not its always the case, since you might see smartphones that was getting bigger screens. But the thing is, electronic things are getting capable of doing something that seems not possible given its size.

It's not actually the size itself, but the "capability" it can do, given its relative size. Some capability might not be as innovative as "being able to fry a chicken in your smartphone" but things that already in place but is then drastically improved.

One of the great examples of that is phone camera. Commonly measured in megapixels, a phone camera can take much higher quality photos with higher megapixels. Though the amount of megapixels is not always the determining factor of high quality image, the point is, with higher amount of data, needs a more powerful processing capability. That means the smartphones now are capable of processing larger data than before. Not to mention, the added capabilities that requires complex software such as face detection capability, digital zoom and etc.

As time goes by, users needed more functionality in their devices. That would mean we need to add more power to each electronic device. How do we do that?. Well, its as simple as adding additional electronics circuits to that particular electronic device.

We are actually doing this method for the past 10 years. The CPU for example in our computers started from 4004 (4 bits) all the way up to iCore-series (Intel ) that processes 64 bits at a time.

There are problems with this method though:

• As you add more circuits to a device, it gets larger in physical size
• More circuits means the device are consuming more power (big issue with mobile devices)
• More power being consumed means the device is getting faster to get hot
• Costs are higher

among those problems, there is another problem associated with this, and that is what popularly known as Moore's Law

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years

For normal human, that means, at some point, we will see the devices we use to stop getting powerful and smaller.
Nowadays, every device manufacturer is on the race of trying to compress more transistors in the smallest possible size (thus increasing the computing capacity) but that method would not work out forever.

After 10-15 years, Moore's law will break down (we cant anymore add more transistors). Not because nobody wants it, but because the law of physics wont let us to.

The problem lies into two main domains: Leakage and Heat

First, lets discuss Heat. As we know it, all electronic device are built around silicon technology, silicon is the the board on which electronics components are placed into. If you have a PC, the motherboard and your video card are actually silicon things with electronic components glued to it. The problem with silicon is, the more transistors is being put into it, the more heat those transistors generates.

The wires and chips that is laid out on that board will generate so much heat that it will actually melt the silicon board. So that means at some point, Intel needs to stop putting more faster processor on their boards, or else it will reach some point that the PC will actually get burned (this is actually the reason why high-end server hard wares are placed into very cold server rooms).

The second part - Leakage. This is related to the actual size of the transistors. We are trying to compress all the transistors into a very small space, since the more transistors that can be put into a particular space, the more smaller and powerful device it will be. But, we CAN'T do that forever.

Today according to theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, some Intel chips are almost 20 atoms across. Theoretically, if we reach the point where the chips is equal or less than 5 atoms across, laws of Quantum Mechanics will take over.

Quantum Mechanics deals with science that is smaller than the atom (electrons, neutrons and other elementary particles). The problem is, in a very small scale, electrons that are flowing in the silicon board has no specific position, particles just pops up out of nowhere and gone.

This is a big problem in our transistors, since transistors works in a way that it detects a flow of electron on one side and decides based on that as 0 or 1 (binary math of computers). It is the binary numbers that is arranged in some very complicated way is the one responsible why the computers can do its task from sending emails down to editing your naughty pictures. But under a very small scale as 5 atoms across, the transistors wont work anymore because an atom can be outside the wire or inside the wire. That means transistor is not sure if there is actually electrons passing or the electrons had jumped on the other wire or somewhere else.

So now that we know the future of our electronics industry, now what guys are trying to do to solve this problem?

Well, right now, the most popular "fix" to the problem is "parallel computing". If you heard the terms "dual core" or "quad core" CPU, that was it.

In parallel computing, instead of putting more transistor into a CPU, chip manufacturers instead put 2 CPU in the same chip. So that the chip is actually twice more capable of processing data.

It is like a road widening project on which the goal is faster transport and avoid traffic. Instead of making the vehicles in the road travel more faster (since vehicles has its maximum limit of speed), engineers instead made the road wider by putting additional lanes in both sides so that additional vehicles can pass through.

It is very similar to Intel Dual Core processors, instead of making the Pentium 4 faster, Intel instead put 2 processors in a single chip to make it more powerful and faster. Now, the latest from Intel is iCore7, means there are actually 7 lanes of rodes where the vehicles can pass through.

There are many futuristic proposals to solve the issues, some of them are protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers and molecular computers. Computers that works in the very tiny space within the atoms itself. When these computers will arrive, was it still unknown, but it should be coming very soon because the Moore's Law is starting to break down and collapse. Maybe you can witness it at the end of our lifetime, but for sure, it will be the things that our grandchildren will be dealing with - commonly called as Post-Silicon era.

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