Slymeat
Move on, nothing to see.
I just found what I think is an extremely telling image showing just how limiting the current push for making things smaller is. The image shown below is from a scanning electron microscope and shows individual carbon atoms, as found in a sheet of graphite. Each fuzzy ball is an individual carbon atom.So very bloody true @Fact Finder. I believe it is time the world stops it’s fascination with making transistors smaller, in order to get speed improvements, and looks elsewhere. And I agree that that elsewhere should be Akida.
At 3nm, transistors are only 15-times the size of a Silicon atom (0.2nm). Surely we are getting to the limits of both manufacturing and also down to sizes where quantum effects start to come into play.
I believe 28nm, or even 22nm, is a nice sweet spot for silicon to operate in. This can be produced economically by many manufacturers, and has inherent heat transfer and robustness advantages.
There is some talk about photon based transistors, which theoretically can be 20 times faster than silicon transistors employing electrons. But due to the wavelengths of light involved (1.3 micro meters —or 1300nm), the transistors necessarily are at about 100-times larger than even 22nm technology.
Source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graphite_ambient_STM.jpg
Notice the scale on the bottom right and you will get a decent appreciation of why I think it will be quite difficult to make anything smaller than 1-2nm - especially when made out of Silicon.
Note: Silicon atoms are ~50% larger than carbon atoms (diameters of 0.222nm and 0.144nm respectively)
So although some new lithography techniques can theoretically work sub-nanometer, I expect they will have no physical materials into which they can etch. So I expect the push for speed and power improvements (using ANY physical material) are quite possibly reaching their limits and alternate ways of improving speed and power efficiency will need to be considered - bring on Akida and doing things smarter!