IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2022 - 76

CAS Society News
Book Review
Daniel Nenni
The Turn of Moore's Law from Space to Time-
The Crisis, The Perspective and The Strategy
By: Liming Xiu
Springer, 2022
ISBN-10: 9811690642, ISBN-13: 978-9811690648
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-9065-5
"
I
In my opinion, the takeaways from the book are
t's time for the big ship
of Moore's Law to make a
turn " is a nonconformist
message that has surprised
me when I first encountered
this book of " The Turn of
Moore's Law from Space to
Time " by Mr. Liming Xiu.
There is a great number of
books on Moore's Law in the
market, some of which focuses
on the history side of
this " Law " , some on the business
aspect of this " Law " ,
and many more on the topics related to the technical
developments of microelectronics. As a forty-year
veteran in this industry and as an author of several
books on semiconductor industry myself, I have seen
a lot and I am quite familiar with all contemporary discussions
on Moore's Law. This book strikes me with
its adventurous insight and broad view. If More Moore
is regarded as Moore's Law 1.0, More Than Moore as
Moore's Law 1.1 and Beyond Moore as Moore's Law 1.2,
then the Time Moore (to use time more, as the author
explains in the book) can be considered as Moore's
Law 2.0. This is due to the reason that, in this work,
Moore's Law is investigated from the depth of two
fundamental constituents of our universal: space and
time; for the first time, microelectronics is inspected
at its root for a potential detour to circumvent the
space crisis that this field is currently facing. Physics,
the progenitor of all branches of science and engineering,
is the place where new insights shall be sought, as
history has taught us many times. Moore's Law 1.x is
about space, Moore's Law 2.0 focuses on time (space
has however not been forgotten, as clarified by the author
throughout the book).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2022.3214589
Date of current version: 13 January 2023
three pieces of message: 1) microelectronics is currently
facing a crisis caused by over-exploiting space;
2) a new avenue is along the dimension of time; 3) in
the new battle, circuit professional will take the lead.
To my knowledge, this is the first book that scrutinizes
Moore's Law from these perspectives. In this regard, it
is unique. I find that those three key messages can be
explicated by borrowing three illustrations created by
the author.
Circa the middle of 2000s, people are aware of an
alarming problem with Moore's Law. Various proposals
have been putted forward to save its life. The two
well-known genres are More Than Moore and Beyond
Moore; each of them has numerous variants. For instant,
the fashionable Quantum Computing is an approach
that can be categorized into Beyond Moore.
Among all such discussions, however, no one has
pointed out that the root-of-problem of current crisis
with Moore's Law can be traced to the space-over-exploitation.
No matter how sophisticated our engineering
skill would become, we just cannot keep making
the basic switch-for-information (i.e., the transistor)
ever smaller generation after generation. When space
is concerned, the end of the world is the string as
modern physics has suggested, which is roughly at
Planck length. We have to stop somewhere along this
path, probably long before we can manipulate space
at the level of Planck length (one nanometer is about
the width of two silicon atoms). Many learned people
know this ultimatum, but none is willing to make
the call of jam-on-the-brake for various reasons. The
most compelling one is perhaps financial detriment
since heavy investment has already been placed in
this direction. Like the little child in " The Emperor's
New Clothes " , this book blurts out that this route will
meet a dead-end and we cannot forever " make transistor
ever smaller and pack them into an ever-smaller
volume " . The author asserts that now is the right
time for a major overhaul. It subsequently suggests
that the new route is along the direction of time, the
only rival of equal weight to space.
To exploit potential from time, this book further advocates
two trailblazing ideas of " adopting nonuniformflow-of-time
for electronics' operation " and " using time
as the medium for information-coding (switching the
76
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
FOURTH QUARTER 2022
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-16-9065-5
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2022

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