MIT's Hybrid Microchip To Overcome Silicon Size Barrier

schliz writes "MIT researchers have successfully embedded a gallium nitride layer onto silicon to create a hybrid microchip. The method could be further developed to combine other technologies such as spintronics and optoelectronics on a silicon chip. It is expected to be commercialized in a couple of years, and allow manufacturers to keep up with Moore's Law despite today's shrinking devices."

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

[Drakkenmensch]

It's been getting interesting these past couple of years to see chip manufacturers not only content with observing the results of Moore's Law, but working hard to actually meet it as a self-imposed deadline. Would Intel have come as far as it did recently if Moore had never put his famous observation onto paper?

phone blobs

[zogger]

It will just become one plastic blob, with the circuitry embedded right in the plastic, and being semi immune from bending fatigue breakage. No board and separate case in other words. I guess they'll need a way to do the sim card, but perhaps they can do with with bluetooth.(or some other shortrange wireless tech). Charging the blobbed batt will be inductive. Pros are sturdy, weather proof and most likely pretty cheap, cons, no user serviceable entry at all without some serious leet dremel skills and a microscope and so on. But really, if they can get them cheaper than even now, along with much higher resistance to breakage, most people won't care about getting inside the thing anyway.

On "exponential" growth

[sean.peters]

Technology often makes other technology easier, so you have an exponential chain reaction.

I hear a lot about the "exponential" growth of technology. I'm not sure whether technology is really growing exponentially, but I do know this: exponentially growing processes don't go on forever - they can't. Rather quickly, they hit upon some underlying limitation in the physical world, and progress stops. I think it's much more likely that growth in technology follows a logistic curve [wikipedia.org], which grows pseudo-exponentially for a while, but then plateaus. We're just in the steep part of the curve right now.