Moore's Law Fails At NAND Flash Node

An anonymous reader writes "SanDisk sampling its 1Y-based NAND flash memory products and has revealed they are manufactured at same minimum geometry as the 1X generation: 19 nm. The author speculates that this is one of the first instances of a Moore's Law 'fail' since the self-fulfilling prophecy was made in 1965 — but that it won't be the last."

Re:It has not failed yet

[invid]

That's why they put the word "fail" in safety quotes, and said they "speculated" that it failed. They were just thinking out loud and speculating on a hypothesis.

It's not a law ...

[gstoddart]

Moore's law has never been a 'law', it's a historical observation.

It has never claimed that this will be true going forward, merely that at the time it was observed that was the case, and it's largely held up since then.

The fact that it's held true this long is staggering, but the fact that it might be running out is hardly surprising. Moore never claimed this would continue forever.

Re:It has not failed yet

[RaceProUK]

It's saying Moore's law has failed exactly because it's 18 months later and you would expect 13nm parts by now

Or a die area twice as large.

Re:NAND flash = transistors on a chip

[camperdave]

It's unreasonable to claim that Moore's law applies at all, because it is not a law, was never a law, and never will be a law. Not in the legal sense, and not in the physical makeup of the universe sense*. Moore's Law is a statistical anomaly. There was never anything preventing any company from developing a technology that packed ten, or twenty, or a hundred times the transistors into the same space as before.

* Given the persistence of the trend, and the lack of sudden leaps in technology, Moore's law may speak more to human ingenuity than integrated circuit technology.