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SAN FRANCISCO--Moore's Law has got time left, but we will hit a wall, said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

"We have another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental," he said during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum taking place here.

The problem is that semiconductor manufacturing has become so efficient, and structures inside chips have shrunk so much over the last forty hears, that not much more can be taken out. Intel's 45-nanometer chips, coming out later this year, employ the element hafnium as an insulator.

Intel has been making insulating layers out of other materials. Those insulating layers, however, are now about five molecular layers thick. "You can't go beyond one molecular layer and you can't really (practically) go beyond five molecular layers," he said.

Gordon Moore speaks Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

A few years ago, physicist Stephen Hawking appeared in the Bay Area and said that the electronics industry is bounded by two fundamental constraints: the speed of light and the atomic nature of matter. "We're not far from that," Moore said.

Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a given chip can be doubled every two years. Companies have largely been able to follow this curve by shrinking the size of transistors. Shrinking the size of the transistors makes them cheaper, faster and often more energy-efficient.

The projection that Moore's Law will hit a wall in the 2020s actually matches a research report (first reported here) from the early part of the decade at Intel. However, Moore and others have noted that progress in electronics will still occur if researchers come up with 3D chips, where transistors can be piled on top of each other. Moore also made a projection that Moore's Law would slow down and even top out in other speeches.

Moore also shared some stories about the starting days of Silicon Valley. William Shockley, the transistor pioneer who was also known to be a tyrannical boss, found Moore while searching for a chemist for his new company. Moore applied to work at another company, but that company opened its files to Shockley.

Moore was part of a group of engineers who left Shockley to help found Fairchild Semiconductor. The group was dubbed the Traitorous Eight. "I think Shockley's wife came up with that," he said.

Intel also became a pioneer in using cubicles somewhat randomly. At first, they thought of putting in offices, but it made the building look "like a prison block." Then they thought of doing a mix of offices and cubicles, but it looked stupid. So they went with all cubicles. Although retired, Moore still has the largest cubicle at Intel. It holds a large circular table.

Intel in many ways lucked out in its early days. When it began in 1968, the company chose to work on semiconductor memory. There were three ways to make memory at the time: bipolar circuits, which Texas Instruments and others were doing; multi-chip assemblies, which had practical problems; and silicon gate memory. Intel went with silicon gate.

It was a lucky choice, he admitted. If they had chosen an easier technology, they would have been swamped by established competitors. If harder, Intel would have run out of money.

"We had a monopoly for seven years. That really helped us get established," he said.

In the future, Moore said he expects big things in natural language processing and biology. A smooth Moore's Law-like curve may not emerge for biology, but the rate of innovation is staggering, he said.

He also said that one of the original names for Intel, suggested by co-founder Robert Noyce was Moore-Noyce Electronics. They tried a bunch, but Intel worked. Still, intellectual property issues loomed. The name was owned by a hotel chain in the Midwest. They had to buy it.

On a more sobering note, Moore, who has donated millions to save forests and other nature areas around the world, said that humans are definitely taking a toll on the environment.

"We are the last generation to have any wild places on earth," he said.

My friend Jerry Pournelle calls Unix the full-employment act for computer wizards (presumably a reference to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978).

Similarly, I regard Moore's Law as the full-employment act for computer pundits. I've written about it several times myself (e.g. here and here); the phrase gets 930,000 hits on Google today.

One of the duties of any publication in the computer industry is to cast periodic doubt on the future reliability of Moore's Law, thus keeping the phrase prominent in the public perception. EDN Magazine discharged its duty for this year with great aplomb by publishing this piece last week.

You'll note this article says that this is "the first time" there's been such doubt. Never mind; they always say that.

The first time I heard that the sky was falling--excuse me, that Moore's Law was being threatened--was as the industry began to consider how to make chips with line widths below one micron (a millionth of a meter). That milestone was passed easily, and a while later we sailed past the quarter-micron mark, and now we're making chips with line widths a quarter of that--65 nm (nanometers, a billionth of a meter).

So now, right on schedule, doubt is being cast on our ability to reach the 15nm generation, which represents another four-fold linear reduction.

An experienced cynical analyst such as myself ought to just ignore this pronouncement, recognizing it for the latest iteration of a tradition that, after all, keeps guys like me in business.

But this time...I dunno, this time it seems more real.

In the past, the answer has always been the same: just draw thinner lines. This reveals new problems, which industry chemists and physicists have always solved in plenty of time.

But physics only goes so far. A 15nm-wide line in silicon is only about 30 atoms across. I'm willing to believe that a 30-atom-wide line will be stable enough. But how much smaller than that can we get?

Even if Moore's Law is safe this time around, the next four-fold reduction could well be impossible. And if that's when Moore's Law runs out--in silicon, at least--what am I going to write about then?