Interview med Intel's CEO:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/26/BUGV88SI8T1.DTLQ: How big is your investment in nanotechnology?
A: Nanotechnology is a buzzword that you in the press have popularized, and the government popularizes it. The formal definition of nanotechnology is anything below 100 nanometers. Every transistor that we make is below 100 nanometers.
So, if you want to know the investment that we're making in nanotechnology, it's the total investment that Intel is making. ... We don't happen to be the nanotechnology that you popularize with carbon nano-tubes and quantum dots and organic molecules that are going to replace CMOS transistors. Most of that is an esoteric and populist impression of what nanotechnology is. The bulk of nanotechnology is what companies like Intel and Texas Instruments and others do today.
Q: Is the process of miniaturization a difference of degree? Or is there at some point where you ... jump off the cliff?
A: We don't refer to it as jumping off the cliff. We refer to it as running into a brick wall. (Laughter). Our strategy is we just motor along at 200 mph, and when we hit the brick wall, we'll hit it at full speed.
We're not slowing down in advance of the brick wall. The brick wall is typically looked at as the smallest dimension that you can use to have a functioning transistor, and we kind of operate in the 90 nanometer range today.
Most theoretical guesstimates are that when you get down to the 5 nanometer range, these things physically don't work anymore, because you've run out of atoms.
You can't split an atom in half or you can't split a molecule in half. But to get to 5 nanometers, you go from 90 to 65 to 45 to 30 to 20 to 12 to 5. So, there's six or so generations between now and then. The next six generations, we'll run 200 miles an hour, full speed ahead.
It's an integral part of following Moore's Law. (Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted three decades ago that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every 18 months.) It's an integral part of our whole business strategy, get more functionality per unit area. That's what the integrated circuit is all about. Our intent is to continue to push that as hard as we can.