Gadgetory

hey everyone welcome to the inside scoop I'm Kara Tsuboi cnet.com joining me is senior writer Stephen shanklin hey trying a Stephen today what we're talking about Moore's law why don't you very quickly give our viewers a quick description of who Gordon Moore was and his law that he created several decades ago sure Gordon Moore is a co-founder of Intel and one of the pioneers of the development of computer chips micro processors in 1965 he wrote a paper that's now famous where he described Moore's law for the first time although he didn't call it that and in that first paper he observed that the number of transistors on a chip that's the number of little tiny electronic circuitry components is doubling every year and in 1975 he came back and revised that view he figured out that is that's actually no actually every two years and it's a law that actually proved remarkably prescient the industry is stuck to it ever since that's why we have ever more you know transistors on a chip and that's why computer processors can do more and more what used to fit on a main frame that fits on a PC and it's a smartphone so it's a it's basically the march of progress rule for the computer industry exactly that's the reason I can have a very sophisticated smart phone in my pocket today but what are some of the problems facing Moore's Law I mean can this really continue and keep up well it's to be clear it's had problems just about every year since its existence and yet the industry just keeps on going clearing hurdle after hurdle so it's there are plenty more hurdles to come looks like we have you know at least a decade left in the current technology and that uses silicon for a very important part of the transistor what happens after silicon runs out of steam is kind of wide open right now and there are a lot of options out there and I think what's most interesting is there is a huge industry that is maniacally focused on making sure computing progress continues even if Moore's Law precisely defined doesn't continue what are some of the solutions that they're coming up with like are they completely rethinking materi rules are rethinking construction like how are they going to do that well currently the leading contenders use the same basic structure for transistors as we have today but one of the most interesting ones is a material called graphene so you leave a lot of the transistor the same but for one little silicon channel you could replace that with a little piece of a substance called graphene that's a sheet of carbon atoms it looks like chicken wire hexagons all stuck together and under the right circumstances graphene is a semiconductor which means that it can transmit electricity or not depending on the situation that's the key thing that you need to have happen in order to make a microprocessor so that's I think one of the most interesting possibilities but there are a lot of challenges in getting that to work and getting to the point where anybody can actually manufacture a chip economically so what happens if the chip industry runs out of steam and can't keep up it's a very interesting question right now most of the people I talked to are not panicking by any means that that that that might happen but you have to ask yourself what would happen and the most likely situation is not that there's some big cataclysmic moment where the industry falls off a cliff but more more as if a gradual tapering down or fizzling there would be a lot of warning in advance if things if the train was going way off the rail so it wouldn't be a sudden thing and there would be a lot of things that the industry could do to help pick up the slack improvements in software improvements in how the processors actually work and lots of other things so I think that if it did happen it would probably be a gradual transition and when it was over there would still be a lot of innovation I think a good example would be the automotive industry you know internal combustion engines haven't changed profoundly in decades you know you get extra things you get anti-lock brakes you get you know fuel injection and you get maybe electric vehicles are radical changes but you know for the most part that's a mature industry it doesn't change very much but it's still a very big and very important and very lively industry fascinating well Moore's law I guess reaches its 50th anniversary in a few years we'll definitely be all watching with interest to see if the industry can indeed keep up thank you so much Steven I'm Kara Tsuboi and you've been watching the inside scoop