Industry Expert Blogs

It is predicted that in 2030 transistors will be a sixth smaller

The rate of product development is facing very real challenges as the pace of silicon technology evolution begins to slow. Today, we are squeezing the most out of transistor physics, which is essentially derived from 60-year-old CMOS technology. To maintain the pace of Moore’s law, it is predicted that in 2030 we will need transistors to be a sixth of their current size. Reducing transistor size increases density, which itself presents issues when considering the relative power for a given area of silicon will increase, as described through Dennard Scaling. When combined with the limitations of parallelism for multi-core architectures, our ability to develop increasingly energy efficient silicon is simply going the wrong way!

As we descend through the silicon geometries we see that the variability of the manufacturing process for the advanced nodes is widening. The loosening of our grip to control thermal conditions presents increasing challenges, this means we cannot simply assume a power reduction dividend by moving to the next new node. The dynamic fluctuation of voltage supply levels throughout the chip threatens to starve the very operation of the digital logic that underpins the chip’s functionality. These factors, combined with the increasing urgency to reduce the power consumption of super-scale data systems and seek efficiencies to reduce global carbon emissions in both the manufacture and the use of electronics, means that we must think smart and seek new approaches. We need to innovate.

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