The end of the shrink

Andrew Kahng, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and an expert on high-performance chip design, says the chip industry has made it a priority to keep up the pace of Moore's Law, ensuring that manufacturers can continue to build and release new product families while using a new process every 18 to 24 months. This means there hasn't been time to explore a number of design tricks that could be used to cut down on power or boost performance. “When you're on that kind of schedule, you don't have time to optimize things,” he says. As the value of the simple shrink decreases, he says, chipmakers should then be able to revisit their designs and find chip-improving approaches they may have missed or else left on the cutting-room floor.