英语学习笔记 #29

The Economist | The incredible shrinking machine

1. There is an old joke in the semiconductor business that the number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years. This refers to another prediction, made in the 1970s by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a giant chipmaker, that the number of transistors(晶体管) which can be crammed(塞满) onto a silicon chip doubles every two years.

2. There are now around 50bn transistors jostling(推挤/争夺) for space on some chips and producers are gunning for more.

3. In the current state of the art(技术、科学等的前沿动态/最新进展), the smallest components (transistors and diodes[二级管]) made on a silicon chip are about seven nanometres (billionths of a metre) across. That is a thousandth of the diameter of a red blood cell.

4. But problems are mounting(逐渐增加). As components shrink, electrons start to leak from the connections between them, causing interference and unreliability.

5. The answer to the electron-leakage problem is better insulation(绝缘) between chip components. And a group of researchers in South Korea and Britain think they have the insulator required. It is called thin-film amorphous boron nitride (a-bn)[非晶态氮化硼薄膜].

计算机第一定律 —— 摩尔定律Moore定律

1965年，戈登·摩尔（Gordon Moore）准备一个关于计算机存储器发展趋势的报告。他整理了一份观察资料。在他开始绘制数据时，发现了一个惊人的趋势。每个新芯片大体上包含其前任两倍的容量，每个芯片的产生都是在前一个芯片产生后的18-24个月内。如果这个趋势继续的话，计算能力相对于时间周期将呈指数式的上升。

由于高纯硅的独特性，集成度越高，晶体管的价格越便宜，这样也就引出了摩尔定律的经济学效益，在20世纪60年代初，一个晶体管要10美元左右，但随着晶体管越来越小，直小到一根头发丝上可以放1000个晶体管时，每个晶体管的价格只有千分之一美分。

后来人们对它进行归纳，主要有以下三种"版本"：

1、集成电路芯片上所集成的电路的数目，每隔18个月就翻一番

2、微处理器的性能每隔18个月提高一倍，而价格下降一倍

3、用一个美元所能买到的电脑性能，每隔18个月翻两番