Record-breaking chip sidesteps Moore’s law by growing upwards

As chipmakers make their products smaller and smaller, they are facing a limit to how much computing power can be packed into a single chip. The record-breaking chip circumvents the problem and could lead to more environmentally friendly electronic devices.

Since the 1960s, increasing power in electronics has meant smaller basic building blocks—transistors—and denser packaging on chips. This trend has been well documented Moore's LawThis means that the number of microchip components will double every year. But around 2010, this law began to falter. Xiaohan Li at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia and his colleagues have now shown that rather than shrinking in size, growing the economy may be the way out of this conundrum.

They developed a chip that has 41 vertical layers of two different types of semiconductors separated by insulating material—a transistor stack about 10 times taller than any previously created. To test its functionality, the team made 600 copies, each with roughly the same performance, and used some of those stacked chips to implement several different basic operations needed by computers or touch devices. The chips worked the same way as some more traditional non-stackable chips.

Lee says producing these stacks requires less power-intensive methods than producing more standard chips. Team Member Thomas Anthopoulos at the University of Manchester in the UK say the new chip will not necessarily lead to new supercomputers, but if it can be used in common devices such as smart consumer electronics and wearable health devicesit will reduce carbon footprint of the electronics industry while offering more functionality with each added layer.

How high can a stack go? “It's really impossible to stop. We can keep doing it. It's just a matter of sweat and tears,” Anthopoulos says.

But engineering challenges remain about how hot the chip can get before it fails, he says. Muhammad Alam at Purdue University in Indiana. He says it's a bit like trying to stay cool by wearing multiple parkas at once, since each layer adds warmth. The chip's current heating limit of 50 degrees Celsius would need to be increased by 30 degrees or more to make it practical for use outside the laboratory, Alam said. However, in his opinion, the only way to develop electronics in the near future is to take this approach and grow vertically.