Congratulations, I thought I'd managed to go a whole year without hearing about process limits and the grim future we face. Seriously, every 6 months or so for the last 15 years or more there is an article published explaining the end of the PC revolution. Google the terms "end of silicon" or "end of moore's law" and add a custom date range like 1998-1999 and you'll get dozens if not hundreds of articles from reputable sources saying that we've come to an impasse or that in 3, 5 or 10 years we will be screwed.
When chips started hitting the limits of the photo-lithography process, they switched to lasers, UV, DUV, and now EUV. Transistors start leaking so they redesign them time and time again. We've gone from completely 2D Circuts to 2 layer 3D to what's it at now 16 layers? The end is nigh and has been since Moore came up with that god damn law.
My point is that there's a lot a really brilliant people in the field who've been working for years if not decades to address problems we haven't even had yet. We're perpetually on the verge of a crisis, and simultaneously on the verge of a solution to said crisis.
We're in an age of ridiculously powerful machines that we don't know what to do with. If suddenly all progress halted in chip development and we had to make due, we'd probably enter into an age of hyper optimization where software engineers would be scrutinizing every clock cycle furthering the annual performance gains we've had for the last 40+ years.
I'm not suggesting a solution, I'm simply stating that lots of brilliant people have been aware of this eventuality and have been actively working on next generation processes to address it.
if "next generation processes" is really the best you can come up with...
Those people are working on EUV at ASML. Those are the next generation processes. What you're suggesting is they have some super science quantum-tunneling barrier that the world has never heard of nor seen nor thought could exist.
When chips started hitting the limits of the photo-lithography process, they switched to lasers, UV, DUV, and now EUV. Transistors start leaking so they redesign them time and time again. We've gone from completely 2D Circuts to 2 layer 3D to what's it at now 16 layers? The end is nigh and has been since Moore came up with that god damn law.
My point is that there's a lot a really brilliant people in the field who've been working for years if not decades to address problems we haven't even had yet. We're perpetually on the verge of a crisis, and simultaneously on the verge of a solution to said crisis.
We're in an age of ridiculously powerful machines that we don't know what to do with. If suddenly all progress halted in chip development and we had to make due, we'd probably enter into an age of hyper optimization where software engineers would be scrutinizing every clock cycle furthering the annual performance gains we've had for the last 40+ years.