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April 2015 • The PCB Design Magazine 9 continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens." Now, as Moore's Law celebrates the big Five-O, technologists are predicting that the law will expire in the next decade. Chip com- panies are spending billions trying to identify the next material, or a new way to make chips. What's After Silicon? A handful of new technologies show prom- ise. Silicon nanophotonics involves replacing the electrons on an IC with light particles, and we know that light can transmit data through fiberoptic cables. Why not use light to move data on a chip? Talk about energy-efficient. Sure, nanophotonics are years away, but there's plenty of ongoing research in photonics. IBM is investing in carbon nanotubes (CNT), and plans to have a CNT chip commercially available by 2020. CNTs have been around for over a decade. They exhibit amazing thermal conductivity, but creating them has been pro- hibitively expensive. Let's see how IBM brings down the price point on CNT technology. IBM is also working with synaptic comput- ing. Last year, the company revealed TrueNorth, the world's first neurosynaptic computer chip, which is designed to operate much like the hu- man brain. TrueNorth features 5.4 billion tran- sistors, the most that Big Blue has ever fit onto one chip. Sure, the human brain has 100 billion neurons, but that's a good first step. But my favorite is quantum computing, which is still in the early experimental stages. Quantum computation encodes data into quan- tum bits (qubits), which can exist in "superpo- sitions," or more than one state at once. This means that a qubit can represent a one and a zero at the same time, which is pretty cool. All of these are in their infancy, and years from being commercially available. The big trick will be to create materials and processes that fit into the manufacturing flow of today, as seamlessly as possible. Good luck with that. In the end, the electronics industry will have to make some adjustments when Moore's Law reaches the end of its life. But it won't be the end of the world that some of the chip com- panies imagine it to be. So, let's sing a round of "Happy Birthday" to Moore's Law and hold off calling hospice just yet. PCBDESIGN Andy shaughnessy is manag- ing editor of The PCB Design Magazine. he has been cover- ing PCB design for 15 years. he can be reached by clicking here. the shaughnessy report MooRE'S LAW TURNS 50 continues