A Practical Low Limit on Energy Spent on Processing of One Bit of Data

The semiconductor industry is very reluctant to revolutionary changes in proven technologies they use. That is why we can expect a long life of CMOS technology. The author tries to answer a question: "Howlong contemporary technology can be improved and scaled down to smaller dimensions?" Considerations are based on Information Theory. Instead of number of integrated devices number of processed, uncoded data per square centimeter per second was suggested as a measure of integrated circuit complexity. A model of logic gate was proposed based on additive white gaussian noise channel. From the model it is evident that we are in transition from band-limited regime of hardware operation to power-limited regime. Power limited regime is characterized by massive appearance of thermal noise hardware malfunctions. Shannon theory promise that it is not a sign of thermal noise death of the technology but a new stage when reliable systems are constructed from unreliable logic gates.