The role of silicon is diminishing as Moore's Law is slowly losing its affection

07/03/2013 - 00:00

By Richard Stevenson -

The transistor isn’t shrinking the way it used to. The best ones we have today are a patchwork of fixes and kludges: speed-boosting materials that push or pull on the silicon center, exotic insulators added to stanch leaks, and a new geometry that pops things out of the plane of the chip and into the third dimension. Now, to keep Moore’s Law going, chipmakers are eyeing another monumental change in transistor architecture.

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