Only a wee bit Moore?

At a Semicon West luncheon on copper issues hosted by SpeedFam/IPEC, the postprandial Q&A discussion turned to the "no-known-solution" boxes in the new SIA roadmap. "Eventually, there are walls. There are physics involved here," commented Rick Hill, CEO of Novellus Systems and a panelist. Weighing in, panelist Victor Wang, a deputy division director at UMC, mentioned "Moore's Second Law" and quipped, "OK, money's the limiter."

Gordon Moore promulgated his so-called second law at an SPIE conference in 1995, writes Charles Mann in a thoughtful essay appearing in the May/June 2000 issue of MIT's Technology Review. Titled "The End of Moore's Law?," the article certainly lays out the scientific challenges of submicron chipmaking. Paul Packan, "a respected researcher at Intel," identified three primary roadblocks, writes Mann. They are dopant clumps, tunneling, and "statistical fluctuations" in dopant concentration. But, the author reasons, it's the business-suit and not the bunny-suit part of device manufacturing that may halt the industry's seemingly unstoppable technological winning streak.

"In the last 100 years, engineers and scientists have repeatedly shown how human ingenuity can make an end run around the difficulties posed by the laws of nature. But they have been much less successful in cheating the laws of economics," Mann says. "If Moore's Law becomes too expensive to sustain, Moore said, no easy remedy is in sight."