There may be a bit more room at the bottom, after all.
In 1959 physicist Richard Feynman issued a famed address at a meeting of the American Physical Society, a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” It was an invitation to push the boundaries of the miniature, a nanotech call to arms that many physicists heeded to great effect. But more than 50 years since his challenge (pdf), researchers have begun to run up against a few hurdles that could slow the progression toward ever-tinier devices. Someday soon those hurdles could threaten Moore’s Law, which describes the semiconductor industry’s steady, decades-long progression toward smaller, faster, cheaper circuits.
via Huffington Post/Scientific American
February 20, 2012
