The end of Moore’s law - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 298

15 The end of Moore's law

Will it be possible to remove the heat generated
by tens of thousands of components in a single
silicon chip?
Gordon Moore 1

Nanotechnology

In 1959, at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pasadena,
California, physicist Richard Feynman set out a vision of the future in a remark-
able after-dinner speech titled “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The talk
had the subtitle “An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics,” and it marked
the beginning of the field of research that is now known as nanotechnology .
Nanotechnology is concerned with the manipulation of matter at the scale of
nanometers. Atoms are typically a few tenths of a nanometer in size. Feynman
emphasizes that such an endeavor does not need new physics:

I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are
not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we
think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it. 2

During his talk, Feynman challenged his audience by offering two $1,000 prizes:
one “to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is only
1/64 inch cube,” and the second prize “to the first guy who can take the infor-
mation on the page of a topic and put it on an area 1/25000 smaller.” 3 He had to
pay out on both prizes - the first less than a year later, to Bill McLellan, an elec-
trical engineer and Caltech alumnus ( Fig. 15.1 ). Feynman knew that McLellan
was serious when he brought a microscope with him to show Feynman his
miniature motor capable of generating a millionth of a horsepower. Although
Feynman paid McLellan the prize money, the motor was a disappointment to
him because it did not require any technical advances ( Fig. 15.2 ). He had not
made the challenge hard enough. In an updated version of his talk given twenty
years later, Feynman speculated that, with modern technology, it should be
possible to mass-produce motors that are 1/40 a side smaller than McLellan's
original motor. To produce such micromachines, Feynman envisaged the cre-
ation of a chain of “slave” machines, each producing tools and machines at
one-fourth of their own scale.

Fig. 15.1. Richard Feynman examining
Bill McLellan's miniature electric motor
in 1960. The motor could generate a
millionth of a horsepower and Feynman
paid McLellan the $1,000 prize money.

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