securities.io, Jan. 22, 2025 –
Moore's law dictates that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will increase approximately every two years, along with computer power. This principle has been largely correct since 1965. However, one can assume that Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel, never considered that chips would reach their miniaturization limitations, causing computational power to lag.
Thankfully, a team of engineers from the University of California has developed a novel method that utilizes photonics to provide more computational power without sacrificing size. Here's what you need to know.
Shrink'em
The world has been on a quest to shrink computers since their invention. Some of your grandparents might even remember when computers required an entire room and many people to operate. Today, your smartwatch provides more computational power than these behemoths, and that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of microcomputing. The journey from an entire room down to today's microelectronics has been an exciting one, filled with experimentation, discovery, and sometimes failures.
Physical and Cost Limitations
Notably, there's a point where manufacturing such microscopic components is cost-prohibitive. According to most researchers, the market has hit this point. Additionally, the computational gains are not in line with Moore's law as the smaller chips can't provide computing power proportional to their larger counterparts.
As such, there's a growing gap between available computational power and what's needed, leading some well-known players in the market, like Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, to state that Moore's law is dead, listing application-specific processors as the future.
Demand for High-Powered Computers
The sudden growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems has increased the demand for powerful computing and cloud platforms. These demands have outpaced the chip design in terms of performance, creating a bottleneck in the AI development sector that limits innovation. Now, the race is on to provide a solution that can keep in line with the demands of today's high-powered computer and AI systems...