Techies absolutely love Moore’s Law. Who can help but enjoy a principle stating that computing power will double in a set time frame in perpetuity? But according to Eli Harari, CEO of SanDisk, flash memory at the very least has hit its limit. The problem? “We are running out of electrons.”
Humanity deserves a pat on the back for building chips that are limited by atomic structure so quickly. According to Mr. Harari, chips used to have around “one million electrons per cell,” which has in recent years become a mere few hundred. As everything is made from atoms, you cannot have a part smaller than one atom, or a cell that takes up less than one electron.
But the reason this article’s title says the Law “might” be dying is because we do not know the end of the atomic structure. Electrons are made up of quarks. It may seem farfetched now, but who is to say that if we can utilize things at the sub-atomic level that we can’t go a little further?
