MOOR'S LAW AND THE FUTURE OF TRANSISTORS!!

What is a Transistor?  What is Moor's law? Why should we care about the architecture of a Transistor?
These are some sort of questions that I will try to answer in this article. A transistor is an electronic device that can work as an on/off switch in the Integrated Circuitry. Silicon chips are the most important inventions of our society, every smart device that we use has these small chips. You can imagine these chips as electronic brains of devices. For instance, Intel makes these chips for computers, Apple makes their own chips for iPhones and Snapdragon processors are used in most Android smartphones.

Now, Transistor is the heart of this Integrated circuitry. The various computations and results are based on the combination of various transistors within the IC. If you are in the technical field you should have heard about the logic gate, these are the various ways to perform different outcomes with the transistors. Back in 1965, the CEO of Intel: Gordon Moor had a paper published which described the doubling of the transistors within a dense integrated circuit every two years. Approximately 40% increase per annum. Which looks something like this:

The trend of Transistors per area in an IC from 1971-2018

Evidently, to increase the number of transistors in a chip we need to decrease the size of the transistor itself. As of 2019, the size of these transistors is in the order of 7 nanometers, which is almost about 70 atomic lengths (considering one atom is about 1 Angstrom). Everything is fine and will be for the coming few years, however, as soon as the architecture starts to achieve quantum scale (~1nm or less) various quantum effects will come into play. The conventional transistor will eventually fail due to Quantum tunneling, an effect that lets any particle pass through a potential barrier without having enough energy. Moor's law will not hold after achieving the quantum scale.

 The L length that you see: that is the length of the transistor (more or less)

Sooner or later we need to face this problem and to find a way out of it. But what if, instead of fighting quantum effects we use them for our benefit. This is the biggest reason why we are hearing a lot about Quantum computers these days. Most major companies in the field of technology have seen this problem already and started working on their own quantum computer, for instance, Google, D-Wave, IBM, Intel, etc. 

We don't want a quantum computer, It is somewhat a necessity to build one. There are still a lot of problems like superconductivity, thermal fluctuation and so on which are an obstacle to the commercialization of these kinds of computers. Let's hope for the best!!