Transistors could stop shrinking in 2021

After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which was officially released in July. After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue traditional transistor miniaturization in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor geometry from horizontal to vertical and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another. For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is that this is the last ever ITRS report, the end to a coordinated planning effort that began in the United States in 1993 and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.