Transistor at 60

Its good to sit back and think about this anniversary. I remember wiring up some transistor based circuits in the 60s, but had no conception about where this would ultimately go. Packing them ever more densely and having faster switches is good, but the claim made in the excerpt below implies that this development alone will solve some remaining tough problems of our time. I don't think so. It will require some tough thinking about the methods that will use all these new chips, and making sure that future versions of Vista don't suck up all that new power.

"The Transistor at 60 (Via ACM Technews)
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) (11/27/07) Head, Beverley

Since its debut six decades ago, transistor technology has advanced to the point where 820 million transistors can be housed on Intel's new Penryn processor. However, the shrinkage of transistors to accelerate processing speed and manage power efficiency has Intel co-founder Gordon Moore convinced that a physical barrier will be reached within the next 10 or 15 years. Not everyone agrees with Moore's assessment. "What's happened again and again when you come upon the physical limits is we've been able to advance around them, and I think that will continue for at least the next several generations," says director of IBM's Australia Development Laboratory Glenn Wightwick. Intel CTO Justin Rattner forecasts that within 10 years electronics will shift from reliance on an electron's electrostatic charge to its "spin," and perhaps usher in molecular devices. Wightwick says many research labs are investigating potential replacements for transistors, such as molecular cascades or carbon nanotubes. The trade-off with a switch to new electronic components is the cost and effort of facilitating such a transition, but users would benefit enormously because their interaction with technology would be easier thanks to single-system chips, Rattner says. He says these advances could lead to innovations such as practical machine translation, continuous speech recognition, and personal robots. "