What happens when computers stop shrinking?

By around 2020, the age of the ever-smaller chip will come to an end -- and we'd better prepare for it
Michio Kaku
Saturday, Mar 19, 2011
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/19/moores_law_ends_excerpt/index.html

This article is a condensed excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book, "The Physics of the Future."

I remember vividly sitting in Mark Weiser's office in Silicon Valley almost twenty years ago as he explained to me his vision of the future. Gesturing with his hands, he excitedly told me a new revolution was about to happen that would change the world. Weiser was part of the computer elite, working at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, which was the first to pioneer the personal computer, the laser printer, and Windows-type architecture with graphical user interface), but he was a maverick, an iconoclast who was shattering conventional wisdom, and also a member of a wild rock band.

Back then (it seems like a lifetime ago), personal computers were new, just beginning to penetrate people's lives, as they slowly warmed up to the idea of buying large, bulky desktop computers in order to do spreadsheet analysis and a little bit of word processing. The Internet was still largely the isolated province of scientists like me, cranking out equations to fellow scientists in an arcane language.

There were raging debates about whether this box sitting on your desk would dehumanize civilization with its cold, unforgiving stare. Even political analyst William F. Buckley had to defend the word processor against intellectuals who railed against it and refused to ever touch a computer, calling it an instrument of the philistines.

It was in this era of controversy that Weiser coined the expression "ubiquitous computing." Seeing far past the personal computer, he predicted that the chips would one day become so cheap and plentiful that they would be scattered throughout the environment -- in our clothing, our furniture, the walls, even our bodies. And they would all be connected to the Internet, sharing data, making our lives more pleasant, monitoring all our wishes. Everywhere we moved, chips would be there to silently carry out our desires. The environment would be alive.

For its time, Weiser's dream was outlandish, even preposterous. Most personal computers were still expensive and not even connected to the Internet. The idea that billions of tiny chips would one day be as cheap as running water was considered lunacy.

And then I asked him why he felt so sure about this revolution. He calmly replied that computer power was growing exponentially, with no end in sight. Do the math, he implied. It was only a matter of time. (Sadly, Weiser did not live long enough to see his revolution come true, dying of cancer in 1999.)

The driving source behind Weiser's prophetic dreams is something called Moore's law, a rule of thumb that has driven the computer industry for fifty or more years, setting the pace for modern civilization like clockwork. Moore's law simply says that computer power doubles about every eighteen months. According to Moore's law, every Christmas your new computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of the number of transistors) as those from the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip that sings "Happy Birthday" to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it? After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away. Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

So the old paradigm (a single chip inside a desktop computer or laptop connected to a computer) is being replaced by a new paradigm (thousands of chips scattered inside every artifact, such as furniture, appliances, pictures, walls, cars, and clothes, all talking to one another and connected to the Internet).

When these chips are inserted into an appliance, it is miraculously transformed. When chips were inserted into typewriters, they became word processors. When inserted into telephones, they became cell phones. When inserted into cameras, they became digital cameras. Pinball machines became video games. Phonographs became iPods. Airplanes became deadly Predator drones. Each time, an industry was revolutionized and was reborn. Eventually, almost everything around us will become intelligent. Chips will be so cheap they will even cost less than the plastic wrapper and will replace the bar code. Companies that do not make their products intelligent may find themselves driven out of business by their competitors that do.

Of course, we will still be surrounded by computer monitors, but they will resemble wallpaper, picture frames, or family photographs, rather than computers. Imagine all the pictures and photographs that decorate our homes today; now imagine each one being animated, moving, and connected to the Internet. When we walk outside, we will see pictures move, since moving pictures will cost as little as static ones.

The destiny of computers -- like other mass technologies like electricity, paper, and running water -- is to become invisible, that is, to disappear into the fabric of our lives, to be everywhere and nowhere, silently and seamlessly carrying out our wishes.

Today, when we enter a room, we automatically look for the light switch, since we assume that the walls are electrified. In the future, the first thing we will do on entering a room is to look for the Internet portal, because we will assume the room is intelligent. As novelist Max Frisch once said, "Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

We have to ask: How long can this computer revolution last? If Moore's law holds true for another fifty years, it is conceivable that computers will rapidly exceed the computational power of the human brain. By midcentury, a new dynamic will occur. As George Harrison once said, "All things must pass." Even Moore's law must end, and with it the spectacular rise of computer power that has fueled economic growth for the past half-century.

Today, we take it for granted, and in fact believe it is our birthright, to have computer products of ever-increasing power and complexity. This is why we buy new computer products every year, knowing that they are almost twice as powerful as last year's model. But if Moore's law collapses -- and every generation of computer products has roughly the same power and speed of the previous generation -- then why bother to buy new computers?

Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.

Years ago, when we physicists pointed out the inevitable collapse of Moore's law, traditionally the industry pooh-poohed our claims, implying that we were crying wolf. The end of Moore's law was predicted so many times, they said, that they simply did not believe it.

But not anymore.

Two years ago, I keynoted a major conference for Microsoft at their main headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Three thousand of the top engineers at Microsoft were in the audience, waiting to hear what I had to say about the future of computers and telecommunications. Staring out at the huge crowd, I could see the faces of the young, enthusiastic engineers who would be creating the programs that will run the computers sitting on our desks and laps. I was blunt about Moore's law, and said that the industry has to prepare for this collapse. A decade earlier, I might have been met with laughter or a few snickers. But this time I only saw people nodding their heads.

So the collapse of Moore's law is a matter of international importance, with trillions of dollars at stake. But precisely how it will end, and what will replace it, depends on the laws of physics. The answers to these physics questions will eventually rock the economic structure of capitalism.

To understand this situation, it is important to realize that the remarkable success of the computer revolution rests on several principles of physics. First, computers have dazzling speed because electrical signals travel at near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed in the universe. In one second, a light beam can travel around the world seven times or reach the moon. Electrons are also easily moved around and loosely bound to the atom (and can be scraped off just by combing your hair, walking across a carpet, or by doing your laundry -- that's why we have static cling). The combination of loosely bound electrons and their enormous speed allows us to send electrical signals at a blinding pace, which has created the electric revolution of the past century.

Second, there is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can place on a laser beam. Light waves, because they vibrate much faster than sound waves, can carry vastly more information than sound. (For example, think of stretching a long piece of rope and then vibrating one end rapidly. The faster you wiggle one end, the more signals you can send along the rope. Hence, the amount of information you can cram onto a wave increases the faster you vibrate it, that is, by increasing its frequency.) Light is a wave that vibrates at roughly 1014 cycles per second (that is 1 with 14 zeros after it). It takes many cycles to convey one bit of information (a 1 or a 0). This means that a fiber-optic cable can carry roughly 1011 bits of information on a single frequency. And this number can be increased by cramming many signals into a single optical fiber and then bundling these fibers into a cable. This means that, by increasing the number of channels in a cable and then increasing the number of cables, one can transmit information almost without limit.

Third, and most important, the computer revolution is driven by miniaturizing transistors. A transistor is a gate, or switch, that controls the flow of electricity. If an electric circuit is compared to plumbing, then a transistor is like a valve controlling the flow of water. In the same way that the simple twist of a valve can control a huge volume of water, the transistor allows a tiny flow of electricity to control a much larger flow, thereby amplifying its power.

At the heart of this revolution is the computer chip, which can contain hundreds of millions of transistors on a silicon wafer the size of your fingernail. Inside your laptop there is a chip whose transistors can be seen only under a microscope. These incredibly tiny transistors are created the same way that designs on T-shirts are made.

Designs on T-shirts are mass-produced by first creating a stencil with the outline of the pattern one wishes to create. Then the stencil is placed over the cloth, and spray paint is applied. Only where there are gaps in the stencil does the paint penetrate to the cloth. Once the stencil is removed, one has a perfect copy of the pattern on the T-shirt.

Likewise, a stencil is made containing the intricate outlines of millions of transistors. This is placed over a wafer containing many layers of silicon, which is sensitive to light. Ultraviolet light is then focused on the stencil, which then penetrates through the gaps of the stencil and exposes the silicon wafer.

Then the wafer is bathed in acid, carving the outlines of the circuits and creating the intricate design of millions of transistors. Since the wafer consists of many conducting and semiconducting layers, the acid cuts into the wafer at different depths and patterns, so one can create circuits of enormous complexity.

One reason why Moore's law has relentlessly increased the power of chips is because UV light can be tuned so that its wavelength is smaller and smaller, making it possible to etch increasingly tiny transistors onto silicon wafers. Since UV light has a wavelength as small as 10 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), this means that the smallest transistor that you can etch is about thirty atoms across.

But this process cannot go on forever. At some point, it will be physically impossible to etch transistors in this way that are the size of atoms. You can even calculate roughly when Moore's law will finally collapse: when you finally hit transistors the size of individual atoms.

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore's law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires. For example, the thinnest layer inside your computer will be about five atoms across. At that point, according to the laws of physics, the quantum theory takes over. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle. This may sound counterintuitive, but at the atomic level you simply cannot know where the electron is, so it can never be confined precisely in an ultrathin wire or layer and it necessarily leaks out, causing the circuit to short-circuit. According to the laws of physics, eventually the Age of Silicon will come to a close, as we enter the Post-Silicon Era.

Excerpted from Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Copyright (c) 2011 by Michio Kaku.

Michio Kaku is a professor of physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, a co-founder of string field theory and the author of several science books. His new book is "Physics of the Future."

Carly Fiorina wrong for HP, wrong for California

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/26/EDFT1G2A5C.DTL

Carly Fiorina wrong for HP, wrong for California
Jason Burnett, Eric Gimon
San Francisco Chronicle
October 26, 2010

In her run for the U.S. Senate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is telling California voters she will bring change to Washington. Should she get elected, we believe she will let them down just as she did the employees and shareholders of HP.

As members of the Hewlett and Packard families, we heard Fiorina make this same promise of change when she took over the pioneering Silicon Valley company our grandfathers started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939.

When Fiorina came to Hewlett-Packard in 1999, the company was still hewing closely to the guiding vision that our grandfathers laid out, which put a premium on integrity, respect for employees and a focus on how the company's work would benefit the broader community. It was known simply as the HP Way.

During her brief tenure at HP, Carly Fiorina broke from these core values - and nearly destroyed a great company.

She ruptured the collaborative relationship between employees and management, which for decades had fostered a talented and loyal workforce. In stark contrast to our grandfathers' track record of avoiding layoffs, Fiorina laid off tens of thousands of employees, shipping many of those jobs overseas.

Rather than the team-oriented approach that had characterized HP since its founding, Fiorina instituted a top-down culture. She got herself on the covers of glossy magazines. Most good CEOs put employees, shareholders and customers ahead of themselves. Fiorina appeared to put herself first. While she asked employees to make sacrifices - including giving up their profit-sharing plan - she took more than $100 million in pay and perks.

She pursued a growth-at-all-costs strategy, which culminated in the merger with Compaq that sparked a divisive fight over the legacy of the HP Way.

What were the results? During her time at HP, shareholders were disappointed by the company's poor stock performance. Employee morale plummeted. Independent management experts and multiple publications have dubbed her one of the worst CEOs of all time. Even Wall Street celebrated when Fiorina was fired, sending HP's stock up. What does it say that HP was worth billions of dollars more with Fiorina gone?

While Fiorina's values were wrong for HP, we believe they would be devastating for California and the nation. On the paramount issue of jobs, she has opposed major jobs bills over the last two years, including efforts to help small businesses.

Fiorina has said she's running on her record at HP. We urge California voters to take a closer look.

She was the wrong choice for HP. She is the wrong choice for the U.S. Senate.

Jason Burnett, founder of Burnett EcoEnergy in Carmel, is the grandson of David Packard. Eric Gimon, a physicist living in Berkeley, is the grandson of Bill Hewlett.

This article appeared on page A - 14 of the San Francisco Chronicle

H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.html
H.P. Sees a Revolution in Memory Chip
JOHN MARKOFF
April 7, 2010

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hewlett-Packard scientists on Thursday are to report advances in the design of a new class of diminutive switches capable of replacing transistors as computer chips shrink closer to the atomic scale.

The devices, known as memristors, or memory resistors, were conceived in 1971 by Leon O. Chua, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, but they were not put into effect until 2008 at the H.P. lab here.

They are simpler than today’s semiconducting transistors, can store information even in the absence of an electrical current and, according to a report in Nature, can be used for both data processing and storage applications.

The researchers previously reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had devised a new method for storing and retrieving information from a vast three-dimensional array of memristors. The scheme could potentially free designers to stack thousands of switches in a high-rise fashion, permitting a new class of ultradense computing devices even after two-dimensional scaling reaches fundamental limits.

Memristor-based systems also hold out the prospect of fashioning analog computing systems that function more like biological brains, Dr. Chua said.

“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.”

In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes.

That is a significant hurdle to overcome, indicating that it is now possible to consider memristor-based chips as an alternative to today’s transistor-based flash computer memories, which are widely used in consumer devices like MP3 players, portable computers and digital cameras.

“Not only do we think that in three years we can be better than the competitors,” Dr. Williams said. “The memristor technology really has the capacity to continue scaling for a very long time, and that’s really a big deal.”

As the semiconductor industry has approached fundamental physical limits in shrinking the size of the devices that represent digital 1’s and 0’s as on and off states, it has touched off an international race to find alternatives.

New generations of semiconductor technology typically advance at three-year intervals, and today the industry can see no further than three and possibly four generations into the future.

The most advanced transistor technology today is based on minimum feature sizes of 30 to 40 nanometers — by contrast a biological virus is typically about 100 nanometers — and Dr. Williams said that H.P. now has working 3-nanometer memristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.

He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.

“We believe that that is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will be able to have in that time frame,” he said.

The H.P. technology is based on the ability to use an electrical current to move atoms within an ultrathin film of titanium dioxide. After the location of an atom has been shifted, even by as little as a nanometer, the result can be read as a change in the resistance of the material. That change persists even after the current is switched off, making it possible to build an extremely low-power device.

The new material offers an approach that is radically different from a promising type of storage called “phase-change memory” being pursued by I.B.M., Intel and other companies.

In a phase-change memory, heat is used to shift a glassy material from an amorphous to a crystalline state and back. The switching speed of these systems is slower and requires more power, the H.P. scientists say.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 8, 2010, on page B3 of the New York edition.

A Human Genome in Record Time

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2009/08/a-human-genome.html

August 10, 2009
A Human Genome in Record Time

A new type of technology has sequenced a human genome in a month and for less than $50,000 worth of reagents, according to a report today in Nature Biotechnology. But this step toward fast, cheap genomes doesn't spell the end for large sequencing centers.

Human genomes produced to date have all required many instruments running in parallel and have cost up to $500,000 per genome, says Stephen Quake, a biophysicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and founder of Helicos Biosciences of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The HeliScope Single Molecule Sequencer is the first commercial single-molecule sequencing instrument, so called because it does not require the production of millions of copies of the target DNA for the analysis. Instead, DNA is cut into small pieces and mounted at very high densities in a flow cell, where a very sensitive camera monitors the step by step addition of bases for each sequencing reaction.

In the new paper, Quake and colleagues report how the machine generated enough data to cover the 3-billion base human genome 28 times over. That sequence data consisted of short stretches of sequences 24 to 70 bases long, which were compared with the reference human genome sequence in public databases to piece together Quake’s own genome.

The demonstration brings “plug and play” sequencing one step closer to reality, wherein individual labs will be able to do what today is accomplished primarily in large sequencing centers. “This is the main coming out party for the Helicos machine,” says Jeffery Schloss of the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

However, the machines cost $1 million. That’s several times the price of other sequencing machines, notes Schloss. While such machines hint at a future where individual labs sequence large genomes, Schloss emphasizes that large centers will continue to play a role in improving technologies and their uses and developing analytical tools for genome projects.

— Elizabeth Pennisi

Get Ahead in a Starter City

http://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/article/103429/Get-Ahead-in-a-Starter-City?mod=oneclick

Get Ahead in a Starter City
by Erin Burt
Thursday, August 30, 2007

It's nearly impossible to get ahead financially while living in certain metropolitan hotspots. Get your footing in an affordable location instead.

I just moved from Palo Alto, Calif., to Baltimore.

No, I'm not crazy. Just broke.

I lived three years in Palo Alto enjoying the beautiful weather, a pristine neighborhood and close proximity to family. But I soon realized that if I stayed, it would be nearly impossible to reach my financial goals. My husband Jeremy and I were spending nearly half of his take-home pay on rent, our grocery bill was eating us alive, and we couldn't afford to buy a house. We didn't have enough money at the end of the month to boost our retirement savings, start a college fund, pay down student loans or take a vacation that didn't include a stop on a friend's or relative's couch. So we decided to pack up and start over in a more affordable city.

You've heard of a starter home, a starter car, even a starter marriage (heaven forbid). The idea is to begin somewhere until you can afford to move on to something better. For young adults on their own, a starter city operates on the same principle. Starting out in a cheaper locale may be just the ticket to get your financial footing.

Cost of living

If you're struggling financially, your location may be the culprit. Start your independent life in such metropolitan hotspots as Boston, New York, San Francisco or Seattle and you could live like a pauper, struggling to find the money to pay down debt, begin investing, buy a home or start a family. The cost of living in San Francisco, for example, is 83% higher than the national average, according to Sperling's Best Places. New York is 65% above the average. In other words, the hype and romance surrounding these cities may not be worth the cost.

Begin life's journey off the beaten path, however, and you could live more comfortably and get your finances on track much easier. That's not to say you have to live in Mayberry. There are plenty of cities nationwide with a low cost of living, a booming job market and plenty of entertainment options. (We identify our favorites a little later and show you how to find a good match.)

And you don't have to make a long-term commitment, either. Three to five years may be all it takes to pay off your student loans, jump-start your savings and build the foundation to your career. Your starter city may even allow you to buy a home and build up equity, making it easier for you to buy a place in your dream location when you're ready to move. But be warned: You may enjoy the lifestyle of your starter city and the money you save so much that you may not want to leave.

It didn't take long for Jeremy and me to learn first-hand that the San Francisco Bay area wasn't the friendliest place for cash-strapped young adults trying to get ahead financially. The median home price, for example, is nearly $850,000. (The national median home price is $223,800.) A 20% down payment would cost $170,000. And even if we won the lottery and could actually scrape that money together, our monthly payment would still have been about $4,300 -- or $51,600 a year (considering a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.5%). And that doesn't include the cost of property taxes, insurance and other extras that come with homeownership.

Sure, with a higher cost of living comes a higher salary. But your extra pay may hardly keep pace with your expenses. For example, an entry-level accountant in San Francisco makes about $47,886 per year, according to the experts at Salary.com. In Austin, Texas, however, he'd make about $37,800 to start. That's 21% less than his West Coast counterpart. However, housing prices in Austin are about 79% lower than in San Fran, and the overall cost of living there is nearly half. So even on $10,000 less, his living costs are dramatically lower, enabling him to live much more comfortably.

Our favorite cities for young adults

Kiplinger's researched the best cities in the U.S. and came up with picks for different stages in life, from young singles to retirees. We looked at affordability, income growth, diversity and the so-called creative class -- how many scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists and entertainers call that place home. For singles, we also looked for places with plenty of things to do. For young families, we looked for low crime rates.

Our top five cities for young professionals:

Washington, D.C.
Denver
Austin, Tex.
Raleigh, N.C.
Lexington, Ky.

Our top five cities for young families:

Atlanta, Ga.
Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.
Des Moines, Iowa
Provo, Utah
Green Bay, Wis.

Make a plan

As for my husband and me, we don't plan on staying forever in Baltimore -- probably five years tops. We figure that's long enough to get our finances on the right track. In fact, we've been here only two months, and we've already boosted our savings with the money we're saving on rent -- and we just bought a house. So far, we're already on a better financial path and living a more comfortable lifestyle.

I know the decision to move may not be easy. Many young adults choose their address to be near friends and family, or because they received their dream job offer. I'm not saying that everyone should cut all ties and run. But if it makes sense for your personal situation, a short-term relocation could pay off big.

It boils down to this: You can choose to scrape by in certain metropolitan areas, or you can build a financial foundation in an affordable starter city. If you can help it, don't let your address stand between you and your goals.

Kiplinger Washington Editors, Inc.