This Is the End of the Silicon Chip, Here’s What’s Next

Quantum mechanics could stop microchips from getting any smaller. What does that mean for the future of electronics?

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Light-Based Laptops Can Run A Staggering 20 Times Faster
“We are rapidly approaching the limit to how small we can continue to make our transistors. Photonics could give us a boost up to fifteen times our current power and speed, even at the current transistor size.”

A Node By Any Other Name: What’s The Difference Between 16nm And 14nm?
“Have you ever wondered what gives a particular CMOS technology node its name? When we talk about 20nm, 16nm or 14nm, what exactly does that number in front of the “nm” mean anyway? Is it the first layer metal half-pitch or the gate length (and while we’re at it, is that the printed gate length, the physical gate length, or the effective gate length)?”

The World's Smallest Transistor Is 1nm Long, Physics Be Damned
“The smaller your transistors, the more you can fit on a chip, and the faster and more efficient your processor can be. That's why it's such big news that a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has successfully built a functional 1 nanometer long transistor gate, which the lab claims is smallest working transistor ever made.”

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Seeker inspires us to see the world through the lens of science and evokes a sense of curiosity, optimism and adventure.

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Special thanks to Julian Huguet for writing this episode of Seeker!

This episode of Seeker was hosted by Trace Dominguez

[Cryptonat]

I'm pretty sure they only made this video for advertising. They didn't really share much information. I feel like my time was wasted.

[Nicoa]

Progress got stuck for years until intel got a bit of competition

[Master_Therion]

I asked this very question to my computer scientist friend, José. "After silicon chips get too small will we need to use a different element, if so which one?" He replied, "Si."

[stevensteven]

I am from the future being specific 2021 iPhone is only changing the case :-)

[guybonberry]

I gave up studying computers ages ago because teachers could never explain how code and transitors worked. Your short video would have solved my dilemma and briefly enabled be to understand the science behind computers. Thank you for educating an ol' man.

[brosch]

It will be interesting to see what we do next when we hit the supposed chip shrinkage limit. Maybe then the computing industry can finally focus on optimization instead of chip shrinking. I'm sure current (and even older hardware) could be a lot more capable if optimization was a high priority. I feel our current and maybe even older hardware rarely realizes their full potential because of the lack of proper coding optimizations.

[MetroidChild]

We've already abandoned typical transistors back around 2010, the switch was to FinFET which has a larger gate area for the relevant physical size, developments on GAAFET will probably extend the limit closer to 3nm. But it's worth mentioning that there are multiple types of transistors around

[adinameissner]

Well, there are also some great potential upsides to the end of moore's law: like our gadgets won't need to be replaced every 6 months and programmers will have to actually start doing a good job since the bloatware hamster wheel will have to stop.

[denisethasder]

We always find a way to improve technology. It’s just a matter of time and resources. Although I can’t say I’ll be paying $10, 000 for a new breed of computer

[greypaladin]

One neat option I have read about is to incorporate the quantum effects of the sub 5nm structures into the design--either using them directly, or having a correction system built in to the chips. But, that still probably won't get us very far for all the complexity it would introduce. I'm betting after 2021-ish machine learning and optimization will be applied to improve software and chip design for another few years while the industry figures out just where it is going to go.

[RMIXMODZ]

I went on a tour to a huge factory where I lived and they said their one of the biggest manufacturers for phone IC chips. They said throughout all of their careers, they have managed to have 3 IC components in the iPhone build and some with others. Keep in mind they have millions of dollars worth of components only to result with 3 IC Chips. Thats just amazing.

[retrobrw]

Hey Trace. You're talking about FETs, or Field Effect Transistors with the gate/drain/source at the start of this video. Not regular transistors, or what we would call Bi-polar junction transistors in electronics, which have a collector, an emitter, and a base. Although, FET's are what most chips are made with now.

[somename]

Quick FYI, the manufacturing process is 14nm (and shrinking down to 7 soon) and 12 is available. The transistors are actually much larger but we can laser etch the fins down to a width of 7ish nm or 14nm for the chips referenced in this video (First gen AMD 500 GPU's, first gen AMD Ryzen chips, etc.)

[tomnoyb]

A single ladder rung of DNA has 18 unique "states" vs silicon's two. DNA is 2nm vs silicon's 5nm theoretical limit. That's 22 times improvement over silicon. Not recommending DNA computing, rather that there are more compact (and thus faster with lower power) structures than silicon.

[JoseRamirez-yhll]

Just when things are going good. Physics always ends up getting in the way. We always hit that wall! *Damn you

[doriandodo]

2:28 CARBON NANOTUBE TRANSISTORS !! - NCIXKeys

[aidangillett]

We stopped going for clock rate a long time ago - we were doing 3ghz+ in the early 2000's - and started pursuing more data in each clock cycle, and more cores to multiply the amount of work that could be done. We don't NEED smaller transistors we can either use physically much larger cpu's or many more of them. I kind of like the idea of having a motherboard with 32 cpu slots in it and you simply add as many cpu's as you want performance. Of course software development needs to change to be highly multi threaded, this would probably benefit most from a hypervisor that dynamically handles this and spreads the load so it appears to the software as 1 core/thread but is actually running on dozens at once

[NocturnalRS]

If you're the driver avoiding eye contact in your commute to work is probably a good thing, otherwise that reference seems random lol.

[williamzhang]

People made the same prediction for the 10nm node less than a decade ago, saying that would be the end to silicons, now we are 7nm. I read that Samsung is planning 3nm Gate-All-Around FETs in 2021, so maybe 5nm isn't the end.

[mykies]

A transistor has 3 leads base, emitter and collector. A Mosfet has gat, source and drain.