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What is Wright’s Law? Pioneered by Theodore Wright in 1936, Wright’s Law aims to provide a reliable framework for forecasting cost declines as a function of cumulative production. Specifically, it states that for every cumulative doubling of units produced, costs will fall by a constant percentage. Wright’s Law Formula Y = cumulative average time (or cost) per unit X = cumulative number of units produced a = time (or cost) required to produce 1st unit b = slope of the function What is the difference between Wright’s Law and Moore’s Law?Moore’s Law – named after Gordon Moore for his work...

Gordon Moore, the tech pioneer and co-founder of Intel, has died at age 94, Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation announced Friday. Moore died peacefully in his home, surrounded by family. Moore was best-known for his famous observation known as Moore's Law. In 1965, Moore made the observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year. Moore's prediction proved to be correct, and the idea of faster, smaller, and cheaper chip technology is still the driving force behind Silicon Valley's mission to this day. “Gordon Moore defined the technology industry through his...

The 0.34 nm gate-length side-wall monolayer MoS2 transistor device structure and characterization. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04323-3A team of researchers working at Tsinghua University in China has created a sub-1-nm gate in a MoS2 transistor. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group outlines how they created the super tiny gate and explains why they believe it will be difficult for anyone to beat their record. For most of the history of microcomputing, Moore's Law has held up—researchers and engineers have managed to double the speed and capability of computers regularly by reducing the size of their components....

Earlier this year I lamented the inevitable death of Moore's Law - crushed between process node failures and exploits attacking execution efficiencies. Yet that top line failure of Moore's Law hides the fact that chips in general are now cheap. So cheap that the cost of making a device "smart" - whether that means, aware, intelligent, connected, or something else altogether – is now trivial. We're therefore quickly transitioning from the Death of Moore's Law into the era of Moore's Revenge - where pretty much every manufactured object has a chip in it.This is going to change the whole world,...

n 1971, Intel, then an obscure firm in what would only later come to be known as Silicon Valley, released a chip called the 4004. It was the world’s first commercially available microprocessor, which meant it sported all the electronic circuits necessary for advanced number-crunching in a single, tiny package. It was a marvel of its time, built from 2,300 tiny transistors, each around 10,000 nanometres (or billionths of a metre) across – about the size of a red blood cell. A transistor is an electronic switch that, by flipping between “on” and “off”, provides a physical representation of the...

Hot on the heels of the closing of the deal that divests its semiconductor business and places it in the hands of Globalfoundries, the former chip making business of AMD that is controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, IBM and its academic and chip industry partners have announced that they have successfully etched chips with transistors that are 7 nanometers in size – significantly smaller than current processes and extending the Moore’s Law curve one more step.It is a big step, however, based on a mix of new technologies that have not been tested in volume production before,...

Ray Blanco, The Daily Reckoning June 29, 2015Do you like your iPhone? Today, you are walking with the equivalent of what was supercomputer not too long ago — in your pocket. The foundation for the modern semiconductor industry got its start in the late 1940s and 1950s. Electronics up until then were dependent on vacuum tubes. These weren’t, to say the least, very easy to miniaturize. But we did try to use them. In 1946, the U.S. government built the first general-purpose electronic computer. It was called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) and contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, along...

The world's largest chip maker just made its largest acquisition ever. Intel is buying programmable chip maker Altera Corporation in a $16.7 billion cash deal with stockholders taking home $54 per share. The merger comes amidst a lag in the personal-computer market, one that Intel's been able to stay above. Intel's first-quarter earnings report in April showed a 3 percent rise in income compared to the same quarter last year. And Intel likely wants to continue keeping its head above water. That's where Altera should help out. A joint press release said Intel's products and manufacturing process will join with...

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.

University of Utah engineers have taken a step forward in creating the next generation of computers and mobile devices capable of speeds millions of times faster than current machines. The Utah engineers have developed an ultracompact beamsplitter—the smallest on record—for dividing light waves into two separate channels of information. The device brings researchers closer to producing silicon photonic chips that compute and shuttle data with light instead of electrons. Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Rajesh Menon and colleagues describe their invention today in the journal Nature Photonics. Silicon photonics could significantly increase the power and speed of machines such...

* Internet speeds have increased by 50-fold in the last decade alone * Optical fibres have reached capacity and cannot transfer any more light * Laying down more cables may solve problem but this will increase costs * 'It is harder and harder to keep ahead,' said Professor Andrew EllisThe internet is heading towards a 'capacity crunch' as it fails to keep up with our demand for ever faster data, scientists have warned. Leading engineers, physicists and telecoms firms have been summoned to a meeting at London's Royal Society later this month, to discuss what can be done to...

Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years. Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.

From time to time various experts come up with predictions regarding the end of Moore’s law, economical and technological viability to double the number of transistors per chip every two years. Some companies believe that economical efficiencies of Moore’s law are going to drastically decrease on 20nm node. But a DARPA expert believes that the law will lose its feasibility in 2020 – 2022, or at 5nm or 7nm nodes.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. claims that the Moore’s law will survive in the long-term, despite of all issues and lack of its economic feasibility for many chip designers. However, future chips will not only gain logic transistors to drive performance up, but will absorb a lot of untraditional (by today’s standards) functionality. “If anybody pushes Moore's Law to extremes, TSMC will be there too, but that is not all we do. We also have specialized technologies such as embedded flash, high-voltage, power transistors, MEMS and image sensors – a spectrum of technologies. And as we move monolithic CMOS on to...

Table of contents 1. The Story Of Fusion Begins 2. Looking For The Other Half 3. Merger And Mayhem 4. Scaling The Brick Wall 5. Up From The Ashes 6. Fusion Ignites 7. Heterogeneous Roots 8. OpenCL And HSA 9. Focus On The Programmer 10. HSA's Big Picture 11. More About The Big Picture 12. HSA Tomorrow You've already read about APUs, and maybe you're even using them now. But the road to creating APUs was paved with a number of struggles and unsung breakthroughs. This is the story of how hybrid chips came to be at AMD and where...

A controllable transistor engineered from a single phosphorus atom. The atom, shown here in the center of an image from a computer model, sits in a channel in a silicon crystal. The atomic-sized transistor and wires might allow researchers to control gated qubits of information in future quantum computers. (Credit: Purdue University)The smallest transistor ever built has been created using a single phosphorous atom by an international team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Purdue University and the University of Melbourne.The latest Intel chip, the “Sandy Bridge,” uses a manufacturing process to place 2.3 billion transistors 32...

Cuts bit size down to 12 atoms IBM announced on Thursday that its boffins managed to cut the physical requirements for a bit of data, whereby number of required atoms has been reduced from a million to only 12. Of course, it goes without saying that this means higher density and more space. Indeed, 1TB drives would quickly become old news as 100TB or 150TB would become a common thing. For its research, IBM used antiferromagnetism to achieve 100 times denser memory. Antiferromagnetism refers to magnetic moments of atoms or molecules where they align with neighboring spins pointing in opposite...

In the early 1950s the same thought occurred to many people at once: things are improving so fast and so regularly, there might be a pattern to the improvements. Maybe we could plot technological progress to date, then extrapolate the curves and see what the future holds. Among the first to do this systemically was the US Air Force. They needed a long-term schedule of what kinds of planes they should be funding, but aerospace was one of the fastest moving frontiers in technology. Obviously they would build the fastest planes possible, but since it took decades to design, approve,...

Scientists at Rice University and Hewlett-Packard are reporting this week that they can overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution. In recent years the limits of physics and finance faced by chip makers had loomed so large that experts feared a slowdown in the pace of miniaturization that would act like a brake on the ability to pack ever more power into ever smaller devices like laptops, smartphones and digital cameras. But the new announcements, along with competing technologies being pursued by companies like IBM...