Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted, in 1965, something which has come to be known as Moore’s Law: the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip for the same cost will double roughly every two years. And the processing power of the silicon chip has more or less followed that law for the last 40 years, mainly because of shrinking transistors. At some point, however, transistors will not be able to get any smaller, and, around the world, professors, PhD candidates and students are looking to nanotechnology to go beyond the dimensions in current chips. Mike Kelly, a professor at Cambridge University’s Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, in the United Kingdom, says reliability could be affected as components get smaller and smaller. His fear is that unless chip makers significantly change the current top-down manufacturing techniques, they will reach their technical limit. Mike Mayberry, the director of components research at Intel, agrees, “We need to do something different,” he said. “We cannot keep driving down that road without turning the wheel.” Mayberry says changing the way chips are made is the only option. “There are going to be incremental advances in all parts of the architecture,” he explained. “It can be about making them more useful, consume less power or take up less space.” Keeping up with Moore’s Law in the future will be tricky, he adds. “We look down the road and it’s foggy. The nearby stuff is clear and we can see that the big stuff is there but we cannot see the details. The horizon is about 10 years away.”