Intel and Quantum for Moore's Law Push

 Where the advances should come from:

Intel Eyes Quantum Realm For Breakthroughs To Propel Moore's Law Beyond 2025  In HotHardWare

A couple months ago, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he would exhaust the periodic table if necessary to keep Moore's Law relevant into the future. We'll see if the engineers at Intel have to actually do that or not. Either way, Intel is confident it can propel Moore's Law beyond 2025 by tapping advances in chip packaging and pursuing breakthroughs in quantum physics.

Lest anyone thought Gelsinger was merely being hyperbolic, Intel doubled down on its "relentless pursuit of Moore's Law" during the 2021 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) event, where the chip maker outlined a path to a more than 10x interconnect density improvement in packaging with hybrid bonding, as well as 30-50 percent area improvement in transistor scaling. Intel also discussed the need for "new concepts in physics" in order to "one day revolutionize computing."

"At Intel, the research and innovation necessary for advancing Moore’s Law never stops. Our Components Research Group is sharing key research breakthroughs at IEDM 2021 in bringing revolutionary process and packaging technologies to meet the insatiable demand for powerful computing that our industry and society depend on," said Robert Chau, Intel Senior Fellow and general manager of Components Research. "This is the result of our best scientists’ and engineers’ tireless work. They continue to be at the forefront of innovations for continuing Moore’s Law."

Intel credited a number of previous innovations for breaking the previous barriers of Moore's Law, including strained silicon, Hi-K metal gates, FinFET transistors, RibbonFET, and packaging innovations such as EMIB and Foveros Direct. But those will only take chip design so far.

Stacking multiple transistors will be key in "mastering the coming post-FinFET era" as Intel looks beyond RibbonFET. This is at the heart of its claimed 30-50 percent logic scaling improvement. But it's also researching how novel materials only a few atoms thick can take the company into the angstrom era.  ...'