Altera CEO Upbeat After Tough 2013

Rick Merritt, EETimes
12/23/2013 02:30 PM EST

On Moore's Law and engineering

SAN JOSE, Calif. — After a tough 2013, John Daane, chief executive of the FPGA vendor Altera, shared his views on the outlook for semiconductors and engineering in a wide-ranging interview with EE Times.

I started off asking about his opinions on the slowing and eventual end of Moore's Law in the next 10-15 years at the 7-5 nm node. The near term looks upbeat, because scaling will continue "for several generations," offsetting rising fab costs, Daane said. "We need to ride this curve and for the next ten years we can do that."

In the longer term, "we have to switch to a new switch, [because] you can't split the atom, so we have to go to a new material other than CMOS." He recalled similar fears when he started his career 17 years ago. "Everyone said one micron was the end, but we found new materials, [so] fundamentally, I believe Moore's Law continues."

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