Chip-making advances announced at the SPIE Microlithography Conference in San Jose, California, showed that Moore’s Law is alive and well. Moore’s Law dictates that chip densities double every 18 months, leading to smaller chips with double the processing power. But the Law has become doubtful lately as lithography and other chip-making processes butt up against the limits of physics. Naysayers say the chip industry has shrunk chips about as far as they can go.
But IBM, for example, said this week it will defy “conventional wisdom” and print circuits with 30-nanometer ridges, a third of the size of the 90-nm chips in production today, using current lithography imaging processes.
