Skip to Main Content
Infochemistry: Information Processing at the Nanoscale
book

Infochemistry: Information Processing at the Nanoscale

by Konrad Szacilowski
July 2012
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
496 pages
16h 14m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Infochemistry: Information Processing at the Nanoscale

Chapter 2

Physical and Technological Limits of Classical Electronics

‘Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination’

Bertrand Russell

2.1 Introduction

Progress in the performance of electronic devices was for a long time well described by the empirical Moore's law [1]. It states that the economically justified number of transistors in a microchip grows exponentially in time. In the first formulation of 1965 it was postulated, that this figure doubles every 12 months, while now (2010) it has been scaled to approximately 24 months. Moore's law cannot be, however, valid forever. The development of information processing technologies (and hence the ultimate performance of the resulting devices) is limited by several factors. Some of the constrains are simply a result of fundamental principles, including the granular structure of matter, Einstein's special theory of relativity, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and others. These limits are absolute in the sense that they impose constraints on any physical system and cannot be eliminated by technological progress. The only way to ignore these constraints may consist in changing the information processing paradigms and utilizing the apparent hindrances. For example, quantum phenomena (which are deleterious for classical electronic devices) can be utilized in quantum computing.

Another kind of limitation results from applied technologies and economics. Device cooling, doping inhomogeneity, crosstalk, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Reinventing the Organization for GenAI and LLMs

Reinventing the Organization for GenAI and LLMs

Ethan Mollick
Swarm Intelligence and Bio-Inspired Computation

Swarm Intelligence and Bio-Inspired Computation

Xin-She Yang, Zhihua Cui, Renbin Xiao, Amir Hossein Gandomi, Mehmet Karamanoglu

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118316191Purchase book