Beyond the silicon transistor: personal observations

Will progress in the miniaturization of silicon transistors soon come to an end? Silicon pessimists and the proponents of revolutionary new devices and circuit architectures have been consistently wrong for decades. The author explores past, present, and possible futures of this elusive aspect of computing technology. Possible successors may be carbon nanotube transistors, DNA computing or quantum computing. The silicon transistor will certainly allow further rapid improvements in price and performance for at least another decade, but it might yet be succeeded by some molecular-scale device that exhibits amplification and is therefore essentially a drop-in in terms of circuits and system architectures.