Gordon Moore, the co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel, said during a keynote at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week that his famous law would have legs for another ten or plus or minus two years provided that the semiconductor’s industry continues to implement newer and thinner fabrication process technologies in two- or three-year cycles. According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors in a processor doubles every 18 to 24 months.

Mr. Moore believes that semiconductor makers will be able to manufacture conventional transistors using even 30nm technology. Moore also admitted that silicon scaling faces several challenges during the next decade, but he at this point he does not think quantum computing, molecular electronics or other exotic technologies may replace traditional silicon.

As I read here, among the challenges in the semiconductor industry is the shift towards next-generation lithography (NGL) and materials to enable future chip designs. For instance, Moore predicted that an NGL technology based on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) would not get deployed in production fabs until 2008. EUV, which is supposed to replace optical lithography, promises to process wafers at the 65-nm and below, but it requires a lot of engineering efforts [and R&D spending] to be developed.

Basically speaking, Moore has just placed the facts for the industry straight. We cannot make anything really serious based on exotic technologies mentioned above now. We are very unlikely to become able to create a state-of-the-art device like a CPU using those techniques. It does not mean we should cease to develop them, but they are not panacea for us in the curse of next 10 to 15 years, at least.

In about two years time the industry is going to start to mass produce 65nm chips and in 4 years it is going to move to 45nm fabrication technology. To design such manufacturing processes is very expensive and there are going to be just a few companies and alliances that can afford to cope with such techniques. Furthermore, semiconductor equipment is likely to cost a lot, hence, there are going to be just a number of advanced facilities all around the globe that will belong to wealthy companies or alliances. That is actually why so many collaborations appear these days.