Researchers say new state of matter could extend Moore's Law
There's certainly been no shortage of folks trying to pin down an end date for Moore's Law, but there's also thankfully plenty of researchers doing their best to keep it going, and a team of physicists from McGill University in Montreal now say they've made a discovery that could keep the law alive even further into the future. Their big breakthrough is a new state of matter known as a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, which they discovered in a semiconductor material by using a device cooled at temperatures "roughly 100 times colder than intergalactic space," and then exposing the material to the "most powerful continuous magnetic fields generated on Earth." Unlike two-dimensional electron crystals, which lead researcher Dr. Guillaume Gervais equates to a ham sandwich, the quasi-three-dimensional electron crystals are in an "in-between state" between 2D and 3D, which could potentially allow for transistors to improve further as they run up against the physical limits imposed by the laws of physics.
[Via InformationWeek, image courtesy University of Cambridge]
