The World in 2030

The World in 2030 61
It is possible that chip developers may hit some sort of physical
barrier in the next quarter of a century as they struggle to
make their processors ever faster and ever smaller. They are
already working at close to nano-scale 117 and making great use
of plastics for insulation, even for microprocessor manufacture.
118 However, it is still possible that difficulties of heat dissipation,
input and output connects, the barrier of the speed of
light itself or problems with the materials in use, may bring an
end to the super-charged Moore’s law speed of development.
For example, the following comes from a ComputerWorld
article published in March 2007:
Makers of memory chips are looking ahead to a day,
not too far off, when technology based on silicon
bumps up against the laws of physics and memory
can’t be made any smaller. That development will
have implications for gadgets like MP3 players and
digital cameras.
These concerns have major memory makers pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into perfecting the
next big technology.
The possible alternatives sound like science fiction:
M-RAM, P-RAM, molecular memory and carbon
nanotubes. 119
Yet in 1982 I was writing similar qualifications about future chip
development as I surveyed what then seemed the breathless
pace of microprocessor development. Back then scientists
were suggesting that a move to super-cooled computing