Is the continued growth of supercomputers challenged by laws of physics?
The ability of Oak Ridge National Laboratory over the last five years to build more powerful supercomputers at an extraordinary pace has been fueled, in large part, by semiconductor manufacturers devising ways to pack more electronic circuits into smaller spaces on silicon microchips. Despite this success, some in the computer industry predict that the drive toward scaled-down silicon microcircuitry will reach its zenith within the next decade as silicon-based electronics collides with fundamental laws of physics that could impose limits on how small silicon-based electronics can be.
