Torturing the Silicon: Stick With CMOS Technology or Try Something Better?
Now that Moore’s Law is grinding down, researchers are looking for the kind of revolutionary innovation that will go far beyond the incremental advances in semi-conductor technology that have been made over the past 40 years.
Christof Teuscher of Portland State University—who authored “The Weird, the Small, and the Uncontrollable: Redefining the Frontiers of Computing” (login required for full text)—believes developers need to stop “torturing the silicon to do what we want” and find a better way.
He writes, “One solution path is to use an innovative combination of novel devices, computational paradigms, and architectures to create a new information-processing technology that could go beyond Moore’s Law.”
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What does this mean? Some of these new frontiers will include neural networks—computers built using the human brain as a model. Says Teuscher, “Neural networks, particularly deep-learning networks, are seeing an impressive revival.”
Related research on Moore’s Law in the Computer Society Digital Library
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About Lori Cameron
Lori Cameron is a Senior Writer for the IEEE Computer Society and currently writes regular features for Computer magazine, Computing Edge, and the Computing Now and Magazine Roundup websites. Contact her at l.cameron@computer.org. Follow her on LinkedIn.
