Intel researchers see a path to one trillion transistor chips by 2030

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Intel has announced that its researchers are planning a way to make chips 10 times denser through packaging improvements and a layer of material just three atoms thick. And it could pave the way to installing a trillion transistors on a chip package by 2030.

Moore's Law is supposed to be dead. Chips aren't supposed to get much better, at least not from traditional manufacturing advancements. It's a lamentable notion on the 75th anniversary of the invention of the transistor. In 1965, Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore predicted that the number of components, or transistors, on a chip would double every two years.

This law lasted for decades. Chips have become faster and more efficient. Chipmakers have reduced the dimensions of chips, and goodness has resulted. Electrons in a miniaturized chip had shorter distances to travel. Thus, the chip became faster. And the shorter distances meant the chip used less material, making it cheaper. So the steady march of Moore's Law meant that chips could get faster, cheaper, and even more energy efficient at the same time.

But Moore's Law really depended on the ability of brilliant human engineers to come up with better chip designs and continued miniaturization in manufacturing. In recent years, it has become more difficult to make this progress. The design of the chip clashed with the laws of physics. With atomic layers a few atoms thick, it was no longer possible to shrink. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said, "Moore's Law is dead."

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Intel has shown how it can build chips with complex interconnected packages.

Now is not the right time, since we are about to start building the metaverse. Moore's Law is key to meeting the world's insatiable computing needs, as rising data consumption and the trend of increasing artificial intelligence (AI) are driving the greatest acceleration in demand ever.

A week after Nvidia CEO said this, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said Moore's Law is alive and well. This is not a surprise since he has bet tens of billions of dollars on new chip factories in the United States. However, his researchers support him at the International Electron Devices Meeting. Intel has made it clear that these advancements are only five to ten years away.

In papers at the research event, Intel outlined breakthroughs to keep Moore's Law on track to reach one trillion transistors in one package over the next decade. At IEDM, Intel researchers are showcasing advances in 3D packaging technology with a new 10-fold improvement in density, said Paul Fischer, Director and Principal Component Research Engineer at Intel, during a press briefing.

"Our mission is to keep our process technology options rich and...