Peter Kümmel wrote:
Moore`s law is about "Number of components per integrated function" or "Number of components per integrated circuit" (see original paper ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf )
The increasing of processor speed was only a "side effect".
That's true; I glossed over that detail. Nowadays we're not as good anymore in increasing speed, while we stay reasonably strong at increasing density. But the two are related: to make effective use of more transistors you need to have data to keep them busy, so you need speedy transportation of data around.
Increasing the size of a circuit there is no physical limit which blocks Moore's law.
As the article says. Notice that wafer size, however, hasn't grown exponentially during the years. Crystal defects are a killer.
Here the theoretical upper limit of processor speed:
1. distance between to transistors: s = 10^-10 m (size of a atom) 2. Speed of light c = 3*10^8 m/s ~ 10^9 m/s (I'm interested in the upper limit)
Interesting approximation :o)
travel time of a signal: t = s / c = 10^-10 m / (10^9 m/s) = 10^(-10-9) s = 10^-19 s
Processor speed 1/t: 1/t = 10^19 Hz = 10^10 * 10^9 Hz = 10 billion GHz
So there is much room to increase processor speed.
There are, of course, many fundamental (just as theoretical) issues that this overly optimistic calculation neglects: crystal defects, thermal effects, current density (already beyond nuclear reactor level in today's processors), communication complexity, tunnel effects, quantum effects... before long, orders of magnitude fall off rather quickly. Andrei