The end of the shrink

Andrew Kahng, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an expert on high-performance chip design, says the chip industry has made it a priority to keep up the pace of Moore´s Law, ensuring that manufacturers can continue to build and release new product families while using a new process every 18 to 24 months. This means there hasn´t been time to explore a number of design tricks that could be used to cut down on power or boost performance. “When you´re on that kind of schedule, you don´t have time to optimize things,” he says. As the value of the simple shrink decreases, he says, chipmakers should then be able to revisit their designs and find chip-improving approaches they may have missed or else left on the cutting-room floor.