Moore's Law is dead.

[towforce]

Any exponential law is bound to break down at some stage, for the obvious reason

I think that a new technology will arrive to renew the expansion.
It always has in the past.
Relays gave way to vacuum tubes.
Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors
Transistors gave way to ICs.
There will be another method.

Oops. ICs ARE transistors. Nothing new there since the transistor was first discovered, other than ways to make them smaller and smaller each year.

You are completely right that ICs contain transistors, and you will not find me arguing about that.

I do think, though, that in terms of creating computing capacity, ICs are worthy of being described as an important innovation - and their production has entailed usage of new technologies that weren't needed to make "old style" transistors.

[whereagles]

10 years ago people said excactly the same.

http://www.cnet.com/news/moore-says-moo ... -hit-wall/

Hehe, they also said 10 years ago that oil will be gone in 20 years .

Mankind would by now have consumed roughly 5-10% of all available oil. Tar sands, heavy oil and shale oil make up like 80-90% of total oil and they've hardly started being extracted.

Here's my prediction: the oil age *will* come to an end, but not due to lack of raw materials.

[towforce]

IMO, the Zuse Z3 relay computer from 1941 is worthy of a mention because it was the last cutting-edge computer in which you could see what was happening.

Here's a video of one in action in a museum in Munich - link.

[bob]

Relays, vacuum tubes and transistors have absolutely nothing in common in terms of how they operate. Nothing. A single transistor and an integrated circuit made up of billions of transistors (today) has EXACTLY the same thing in common. They use the same technology in the same way, only at a different physical size.

Again you have no clue how things operate. All of them modulate current flow, relays discretely (like transistors in switching mode), tubes continuously. There are hundreds of different transistor technologies.
Si BJTs are more different from for example GaAs FinFETs than relays from MOSFETs. Different principle of operation, different material, different geometry, totally different transfer characteristic, switching (turning on) mechanism, etc. etc.
I could write for days, but sadly, you wouldn't understand.

A transistor and a tube can perform a similar function (amplification) but they do not use the SAME physical process

They use exactly the same physical principle. They modulate the electron flow based on the potential of the control terminal.

Study electronics a bit. Where is the heated cathode that emits electrons? Where is the anode that collects them? Where is the grid that can be charged to impede electrons passing through?

Functionally, a relay, a tube and a transistor can be used to switch current on and off, yes. Functionally a tube or transistor can be used to amplify a signal.

operationally they work using completely different physics and nobody considers them to be equivalent technologies. But transistors are transistors and they all depend on the same physical process to operate. Regardless of their size. I don't consider a pocket-sized revolver to be a different technology than the Smith & Wesson .50 cal revolver. I don't consider the smart car to be a different technology than a hummer. Even if the smart car can fit in the back of the hummer.

Give up on this.

So you believe that the original plate capacitors (as used in tuning devices for radios), the rolled bi-metallic sheets as used in the early capacitors as well, and advancing to the current trench capacitors in ICs don't share "two metal plates separated by an insulator?

Capacitors in DRAM are made from polysilicon that is a semiconductor. Semiconductors are totally different from metals. I know that you might have difficulty to understand such simple concepts, but I can't help you there.

Better look again. The plates are STILL there. The insulator is STILL there. They still work by storing an excess of electrons on one plate, which want to get to the other plate to equalize the charge. Only the size has changed. There is a single diagram used for a capacitor no matter what its type. There's a reason. Current DRAM (1T1C devices) are certainly different from multiple transistors used to store a 0/1 in an SRAM chip. Transistors are transistors, resistors are resistors, capacitors are capacitors, chokes are chokes, diodes are diodes, etc. Big, small and all sizes in between does not change their electrical properties.

Your understanding of electronics seams to be on the elementary school level. There is no such a thing as an ideal capacitor, resistor, inductor, diode etc. Every element has multiple properties and not only parasitic. For example, the most efficient (capacity vs. size) capacitors in MOS technology are exactly transistors with drain and source shorted acting as one terminal, and gate acting as the other. Resistors are usually made from polysilicon and could also work as capacitors, but you can also make them from transistors which is often the case in simpler processes. Diodes in most of MOS processes are made exclusively from transistors, often using parasitics (substrate contact and source).
I don't understand what you mean by "single diagram for capacitor" never heard of such a thing, but if you mean that current is linearly proportional to the derivative of difference of potentials between the plates, you are utterly wrong. These things are so badly non-linear, that you can't probably even imagine it.

Once again, everything is a capacitor, even your hair, or my blanket, but electrical characteristics between discrete capacitor, my blanket, your hair and trenched DRAM capacitor are totally different in pretty much same degree.

Capacitor diagram = straight horizontal line on both sides, terminating at a straight vertical line on one side and a curved vertical line on the other. Electronics 101. A resistor is a zigzag line. A transistor is a circle with three lines entering, the emitter, the base and the collector.

This has gone on long enough. We are using transistors today just as we were using them in the 40's and 50's. They are simply smaller. That they are made with different materials is is irrelevant. We are using the same physical properties that were used in the post-vacuum-tube days. The ability to switch a signal on and off (for digital circuits anyway). You like to argue just for the sake of arguing. Feel free to continue. If you think making 'em smaller is making 'em different, think what you want.

My electronics background might be at the elementary school level somewhere. But it was good enough to (a) earn my amateur novice, general and technician licenses in 1957 when I was 9 years old and (b) let me design and build a ton of electronic projects from communication devices to my electronic chess board done in 1978. I certainly "get by".

[bob]

Any exponential law is bound to break down at some stage, for the obvious reason

I think that a new technology will arrive to renew the expansion.
It always has in the past.
Relays gave way to vacuum tubes.
Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors
Transistors gave way to ICs.
There will be another method.

Oops. ICs ARE transistors. Nothing new there since the transistor was first discovered, other than ways to make them smaller and smaller each year.

You are completely right that ICs contain transistors, and you will not find me arguing about that.

I do think, though, that in terms of creating computing capacity, ICs are worthy of being described as an important innovation - and their production has entailed usage of new technologies that weren't needed to make "old style" transistors.

wouldn't disagree. I've lived through discrete transistor computers, then integrated circuits (i.e. the 74xx series with a half-dozen gates on a chip (OR, NAND, mux/demux, etc, to LSI, to VLSI and I am sure that if Intel had been naming these generations we would be at USHSLSI (ultra super-high super-large scale integration) based on how they have named registers in X86.

So yes, they were a huge innovation, but all based on the same underlying technology of the transistor.

[bob]

IMO, the Zuse Z3 relay computer from 1941 is worthy of a mention because it was the last cutting-edge computer in which you could see what was happening.

Here's a video of one in action in a museum in Munich - link.

I have an autographed photo Claude Shannon gave me years ago. It has a picture of him and Edward Lasker (GM) with the relay-based machine he built that played KR vs K endgames, early 1950's.

[mvk]

Once again, everything is a capacitor, even your hair, or my blanket, but electrical characteristics between discrete capacitor, my blanket, your hair and trenched DRAM capacitor are totally different in pretty much same degree.

I agree. One can't really unify the operating principles of bipolars and FETs other than by saying "both use a semiconductor to control a resistance". A bit too high-level to my taste. One uses current as a signal on a base, the other voltage on a gate, and the underlying operating principle is necessarily quite different.

[Dann Corbit]

And vacuum tubes use high voltage to send electrons through a vacuum with a grid in between anode and cathode to regulate it, and solenoids use a electromagnetic field to move a bar of iron to open and close a circuit.

On a high level, all are identical. We have a switch that allows current to flow or prevents it from flowing.

On a low level they are very different.
We can call them the same and be truthful.
We can call them different and be truthful.

Bottom line is that over time the switches got smaller and faster.

I think that is safe enough to say.