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Moore’s Law Part 4: Moore's Law in other domains
Friday, November 15, 2013
This is the last entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moore's Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.
--
The quest
for Moore’s Law
and its potential impact in other disciplines is a journey the technology industry is starting, by crossing the Rubicon from the semiconductor industry to other less explored fields, but with the particular mindset created by Moore’s Law. Our goal is to explore if there are Moore’s Law opportunities emerging in other disciplines, as well as its potential impact. As such, we have interviewed several professors and researchers and asked them if they could see emerging ‘Moore’s Laws’ in their discipline. Listed below are some highlights of those discussions, ranging from CS+ to potentials in the Energy Sector:
Sensors and Data Acquisition
Ed Parsons
, Google Geospatial Technologist
The More than Moore discussion can be extended to outside of the main chip, and go within the same board as the main chip or within the device that a user is carrying. Greater sensors capabilities (for the measurement of pressure, electromagnetic field and other local conditions) allow including them in smart phones, glasses, or other devices and perform local data acquisition. This trend is strong, and should allow future devices benefiting from Moore’s Law to receive enough data to perform more complex applications.
Metcalfe’s Law
states that the value of a telecommunication network is proportional to the square of connected nodes of the system. This law can be used in parallel to Moore’s Law to evaluate the value of the
Internet of Things
. The network itself can be seen as composed by layers: at the user’s local level (to capture data related to the body of the user, or to immediately accessible objects), locally around the user (such as to get data within the same street as the user), and finally globally (to get data from the global internet). The extrapolation made earlier in this blog (several TB available in flash memory) will lead to the ability to construct, exchange and download/upload entire contexts for a given situation or a given application and use these contexts without intense network activity, or even with very little or no network activity.
Future of Moore’s Law and its impact on Physics
Sverre Jarp
, CERN
CERN
, and its experiments with the Large Electron-Positron Collider (
LEP
) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generate data on the order of a PetaByte per year; this data has to be filtered, processed and analyzed in order to find meaningful physics events leading to new discoveries. In this context Moore’s Law has been particularly helpful to allow computing power, storage and networking capabilities at CERN and at other High Energy Physics (
HEP
) centers to scale up regularly. Several generations of hardware and software have been exhausted during the journey from mainframes to today’s clusters.
CERN has a long tradition of collaboration with chip manufacturers, hardware and software vendors to understand and predict next trends in the computing evolution curve. Recent analysis indicates that Moore’s Law will likely continue over the next decade. The statement of ‘several TB of flash memory availability by 2025’ may even be a little conservative according to most recent analysis.
Big Data Visualizations
Katy Börner
, Indiana University
Thanks to Moore’s Law, the amount of data available for any given phenomenon, whether sensed or simulated, has been growing by several orders of magnitude over the past decades. Intelligent sampling can be used to filter out the most relevant bits of information and is practiced in Physics, Astronomy, Medicine and other sciences. Subsequently, data needs to be analyzed and visualized to identify meaningful trends and phenomena, and to communicate them to others.
While most people learn in school how to read charts and maps, many never learn how to read a network layout—data literacy remains a challenge. The
Information Visualization Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
at Indiana University teaches students from more than 100 countries how to read but also how to design meaningful network, topical, geospatial, and temporal visualizations. Using the tools introduced in this free course anyone can analyze, visualize, and navigate complex data sets to understand patterns and trends.
Candidate for Moore’s Law in Energy
Professor Francesco Stellacci
, EPFL
It is currently hard to see a “Moore’s Law” applying to candidates in energy technology. Nuclear fusion could reserve some positive surprises, if several significant breakthroughs are found in the process of creating usable energy with this technique. For any other technology the technological growth will be slower. Best solar cells of today have a 30% efficiency, which could scale higher of course (obviously not much more than a factor of 3). Also cost could be driven down by an order of magnitude. Best estimates show, however, a combined performance improvement by a factor 30 over many years.
Further Discussion of Moore’s Law in Energy
Ross Koningstein
, Google Director Emeritus
As of today there is no obvious Moore’s Law in the Energy sector which could decrease some major costs by 50% every 18 months. However material properties at nanoscale, and chemical processes such as
catalysis
are being investigated and could lead to promising results. Applications targeted are
hydrocarbon
creation at scale and improvement of
oil refinery processes
, where breakthrough in micro/nano property catalysts is pursued. Hydrocarbons are much more compatible at scale with the existing automotive/aviation and natural gas distribution systems. Here in California,
Google Ventures
has invested in
Cool Planet Energy Systems
, a company with neat technology that can convert biomass to gasoline/jet fuel/diesel with impressive efficiency.
One of the challenges is the ability to run many experiments at low cost per experiment, instead of only a few expensive experiments per year. Discoveries are likely to happen faster if more experiments are conducted. This leads to heavier investments, which are difficult to achieve within slim margin businesses. Therefore the nurturing processes for disruptive business are likely to come from new players, beside existing players which will decide to fund significant new investments.
Of course, these discussions could be opened for many other sectors. The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the
Research at Google Google+ page
. Please join, and share your thoughts.
Moore’s Law, Part 3: Possible extrapolations over the next 15 years and impact
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
This is the third entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moore's Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.
--
More Moore
We examine data from the ITRS 2012
Overall Roadmap Technology Characteristics
(ORTC 2012), and select notable interpolations; The chart below shows chip size trends up to the year 2026 along with the “Average Moore’s Law” line. Additionally, in the
ORTC 2011 tables
we find data on 3D chip layer increases (up to 128 layers), including costs. Finally, the ORTC 2011 index sheet estimates that the
DRAM
cost per bit at production will be ~0.002 microcents per bit by ~2025. From these sources we draw three More Moore (MM) extrapolations, that by the year 2025:
4Tb Flash
multi-level cell
(MLC) memory will be in production
There will be ~100 billion transistors per microprocessing unit (MPU)
1TB RAM Memory will cost less than $100
More than Moore
It should be emphasized that “More than Moore” (MtM) technologies do not constitute an alternative or even a competitor to the digital trend as described by Moore’s Law. In fact, it is the heterogeneous integration of digital and non-digital functionalities into compact systems that will be the key driver for a wide variety of application fields. Whereas MM may be viewed as the brain of an intelligent compact system, MtM refers to its capabilities to interact with the outside world and the users.
As such, functional diversification may be regarded as a complement of digital signal and data processing in a product. This includes the interaction with the outside world through sensors and actuators and the subsystem for powering the product, implying analog and mixed signal processing, the incorporation of passive and/or high-voltage components, micro-mechanical devices enabling biological functionalities, and more. While MtM looks very promising for a variety of diversification topics, the ITRS study does not give figures from which “solid” extrapolations can be made. However, we can make safe/not so safe bets going towards 2025, and examine what these extrapolations mean in terms of the user.
Today we have a 1TB hard disk drives (HDD) for $100, but the access speed to data on the disk does not allow to take full advantage of this data in a fully interactive, or even practical, way. More importantly, the size and construction of HDD does not allow for their incorporation into mobile devices, Solid state drives (SSD), in comparison, have similar data transfer rates (~1Gb/s), latencies typically 100 times less than HDD, and have a significantly smaller form factor with no moving parts. The promise of offering several TB of flash memory, cost effectively by 2025, in a device carried along during the day (e.g. smartphone, watch, clothing, etc.) represents a paradigm shift with regard of today’s situation; it will empower the user by moving him/her from an environment where local data needs to be refreshed frequently (as with augmented reality applications) to a new environment where full contextual data will be available locally and refreshed only when critically needed.
If data is pre-loaded in the order of magnitude of TBs, one will be able to get a complete contextual data set loaded before an action or a movement, and the device will dispatch its local intelligence to the user during the progress of the action, regardless of network availability or performance. This opens up the possibility of combining local 3D models and remote inputs, allowing applications like 3D conferencing to become available. The development and use of 3D avatars could even facilitate many social interaction models. To benefit from such applications the use of personal devices such as Google Glass may become pervasive, allowing users to navigate 3D scenes and environments naturally, as well as facilitating 3D conferencing and their “social” interactions.
The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the
Research at Google Google+ page
. Please join, and share your thoughts.
Moore’s Law, Part 2: More Moore and More than Moore
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
This is the second entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moore's Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.
--
One of the fundamental lessons derived for the past successes of the semiconductor industry comes for the observation that most of the innovations of the past ten years—those that indeed that have revolutionized the way CMOS transistors are manufactured nowadays—were initiated 10–15 years before they were incorporated into the CMOS process. Strained silicon research began in the early 90s, high-κ/metal-gate initiated in the mid-90s and multiple-gate transistors were pioneered in the late 90s. This fundamental observation generates a simple but fundamental question: “What should the ITRS do to identify now what the extended semiconductor industry will need 10–15 years from now?”
-
International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2012
More Moore
As we look at the years 2020–2025, we can see that the physical dimensions of
CMOS
manufacture are expected to be crossing below the 10 nanometer threshold. It is expected that as dimensions approach the 5–7 nanometer range it will be difficult to operate any transistor structure that is utilizing the metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) physics as the basic principle of operation. Of course, we expect that new devices, like the
very promising tunnel transistors
, will allow a smooth transition from traditional CMOS to this new class of devices to reach these new levels of miniaturization. However, it is becoming clear that fundamental geometrical limits will be reached in the above timeframe. By fully utilizing the vertical dimension, it will be possible to
stack layers of transistors
on top of each other, and this 3D approach will continue to increase the number of components per square millimeter even when horizontal physical dimensions will no longer be amenable to any further reduction. It seems important, then, that we ask ourselves a fundamental question: “How will we be able to increase the computation and memory capacity when the device physical limits will be reached?” It becomes necessary to re-examine how we can get more information in a finite amount of space.
The semiconductor industry has thrived on
Boolean logic
; after all, for most applications the CMOS devices have been used as nothing more than an “on-off” switch. Consequently, it becomes of paramount importance to develop new techniques that allow the use of multiple (i.e., more than 2) logic states in any given and finite location, which evokes the magic of “
quantum computing
” looming in the distance. However, short of reaching this goal, a field of active research involves
increasing the number of states
available, e.g. 4–10 states, and to increase the number of “virtual transistors” by 2 every 2 years.
More than Moore
During the blazing progress propelled by Moore’s Law of semiconductor logic and memory products, many “complementary” technologies have progressed as well, although not necessarily scaling to Moore’s Law. Heterogeneous integration of multiple technologies has generated “added value” to devices with multiple applications, beyond the traditional semiconductor logic and memory products that had lead the semiconductor industry from the mid 60s to the 90s. A variety of wireless devices contain typical examples of this confluence of technologies, e.g. logic and memory devices, display technology, microelectricomechanical systems (
MEMS
), RF and Analog/Mixed-signal technologies (
RF/AMS
), etc.
The ITRS has incorporated More than Moore and RF/AMS chapters in the main body of the ITRS, but is uncertain whether this is sufficient to encompass the plethora of associated technologies now entangled into modern products, or the multi-faceted public consumer who has become an influential driver of the semiconductor industry, demanding custom functionality in commercial electronic products. In the next blog of this series, we will examine select data from the
ITRS Overall Roadmap Technology Characteristics (ORTC) 2012
and attempt to extrapolate the progress in the next 15 years, and its potential impact.
The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the
Research at Google Google+ page
. Please join, and share your thoughts.
Moore’s Law, Part 1: Brief history of Moore's Law and current state
Monday, November 11, 2013
This is the first entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moore's Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.
---
Moore's Law is the observation that over the
history of computing hardware
, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to Intel executive David House, who predicted that period for a doubling in chip performance (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).
-
Wikipedia
Moore’s Law is named after Intel co-founder
Gordon E. Moore
, who described the trend in his
1965 paper
. In it, Moore noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years". Moore’s prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.
The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of
pixels in digital cameras
. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well (see
Other formulations and similar laws
). This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the
world economy
, and is a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Most improvement trends have resulted principally from the industry’s ability to exponentially decrease the minimum feature sizes used to fabricate integrated circuits. Of course, the most frequently cited trend is in integration level, which is usually expressed as Moore’s Law (that is, the number of components per chip doubles roughly every 24 months). The most significant trend is the decreasing cost-per-function, which has led to significant improvements in economic productivity and overall quality of life through proliferation of computers, communication, and other industrial and consumer electronics.
Transistor counts for integrated circuits plotted against their dates of introduction. The curve shows Moore's law - the doubling of transistor counts every two years. The y-axis is logarithmic, so the line corresponds to exponential growth
All of these improvement trends, sometimes called “scaling” trends, have been enabled by large R&D investments. In the last three decades, the growing size of the required investments has motivated industry collaboration and spawned many R&D partnerships, consortia, and other cooperative ventures. To help guide these R&D programs, the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) initiated the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (
NTRS
) in 1992. Since its inception, a basic premise of the NTRS has been that continued scaling of electronics would further reduce the cost per function and promote market growth for integrated circuits. Thus, the Roadmap has been put together in the spirit of a challenge—essentially, “What technical capabilities need to be developed for the industry to stay on Moore’s Law and the other trends?”
In 1998, the SIA was joined by corresponding industry associations in Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to participate in a 1998 update of the Roadmap and to begin work toward the first International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (
ITRS
), published in 1999. The overall objective of the ITRS is to present industry-wide consensus on the “best current estimate” of the industry’s research and development needs out to a 15-year horizon. As such, it provides a guide to the efforts of companies, universities, governments, and other research providers or funders. The ITRS has improved the quality of R&D investment decisions made at all levels and has helped channel research efforts to areas that most need research breakthroughs.
For more than half a century these scaling trends continued, and
sources in 2005
expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020. However, the
2010 update to the ITRS
has growth slowing at the end of 2013, after which time transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years. Accordingly, since 2007 the ITRS has addressed the concept of functional diversification under the title “
More than Moore
” (MtM). This concept addresses an emerging category of devices that incorporate functionalities that do not necessarily scale according to “Moore's Law,” but provide additional value to the end customer in different ways.
The MtM approach typically allows for the non-digital functionalities (e.g., RF communication, power control, passive components, sensors, actuators) to migrate from the system board-level into a particular package-level (
SiP
) or chip-level (
SoC
) system solution. It is also hoped that by the end of this decade, it will be possible to augment the technology of constructing integrated circuits (
CMOS
) by introducing new devices that will realize some “beyond CMOS” capabilities. However, since these new devices may not totally replace CMOS functionality, it is anticipated that either chip-level or package level integration with CMOS may be implemented.
The ITRS provides a very comprehensive analysis of the perspective for Moore’s Law when looking towards 2020 and beyond. The analysis can be roughly segmented into two trends: More Moore (MM) and More than Moore (MtM). In the next blog in this series, we will look in the the recent conclusions mentioned in the ITRS 2012 report on both trends.
The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the
Research at Google Google+ page
. Please join, and share your thoughts.
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