Don???t lie down and die, go up [Electronics 3D]

IN THE YEARS that followed the punk movement???s brief summer of 1977, forlorn stragglers with hair carved into bright green and pink Mohicans would wander London???s King???s Road long after the shops that briefly made them fashionable had shut or simply moved onto the Next Big Thing. Their T-shirts carried the plea: ???Punk???s dead but we???re still dying???. Moore???s Law as we have come to know it has similarly entered its Mohican phase. At the Design Automation Conference in San Francisco in June 2014, engineers talked openly about the likelihood that the scaling trend for silicon that used to see transistor density double every two years was coming to a juddering halt. Their comments echoed those of IBM chief technologist Bernie Meyerson earlier last year in an interview ahead of delivering the IET/BCS Turing Lecture: ???The truth is, Moore???s Law died in 2003. It???s been effectively dead for ten years but we???ve continued to struggle with it.???