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Will we see the last best smartphone within the decade?

By Abdullah Asim

Published: Nov 08, 2024, 4:46 PM

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ASML (Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography) has just started shipping equipment to make 1 nm chips. It got me thinking, where does it end? How small is too small and is the smartphone industry about to hit a physical bottleneck? Turns out the answer is a bit more complex than a simple yes or no.

Is Moore's Law even relevant?

Moore’s Law — or Moore’s Trend as some engineers and physicists like to call it — is an observation by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. It stated that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every two years with minimal increase in cost. This is something that has remained mostly true for a very long time, giving us the annual upgrades in power we’ve come to expect from flagship smartphones.

But as chipsets have decreased in size so has the viability of manufacturing them. Yield rates are getting worse and the cost factor has slowly started to creep in. Samsung Foundry, for example, has recently started hitting yield rates as low as 10 percent, putting a damper on its plans to manufacture 1.4 nm chips by 2027.

But Moore’s Law has been disregarded by some since the 2010s for another reason.

Modern chip measurements are just marketing

Image credit — PhoneArena

We’ve recently seen 3 nm chipsets make their way to our flagship phones and we’re already hearing about work starting on 2 nm chips. But these measurements aren’t really accurate: they’re more of a way to let the average layman understand improvements in chip design.

Up until around 2010 these measurements actually related to the size of the elements within a transistor. Until this point we also saw massive improvements in clock speeds for processors, something that has significantly slowed down since.

As manufacturers started hitting the physical limits of how small they could go they began coming up with newer ways to manufacture chips. These new methodologies essentially made nm measurements more and more inaccurate the further they advanced. Current measurements are now used more for marketing than any actual explanations of size.

In short, your flagship phone doesn’t really run on a 3 nm chipset. 3 nm is whatever the company decides to label it as, and it merely signifies a newer model more than anything else.

The Uncertainty Principle may halt all progress

The laws of physics have had enough. | Image credit — Huawei

Then there’s another problem: Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. A defining principle for everyone’s favorite buzzwords: quantum computing. In the simplest terms, we will eventually get to a point where quantum uncertainty will make it impossible to manufacture anything viable. Quantum uncertainty is the quality of particles at atomic scales: making them very unpredictable and difficult to measure.

1 nm chipsets don’t have to be the end. Just a few years ago people were wondering whether we’d ever be able to break past the 5 nm barrier. Every time progress has shown signs of slowing down someone has come up with new methods to keep chugging along like what happened around 2010.

So though we may go into scales of 0.7 nm or even less in the future, unless we see another breakthrough we will eventually see Moore’s Law come to an end. The Uncertainty Principle, though not directly the cause of progress slowing down, will eventually present us with a hard limit. There’s only so low we can go before electrons start behaving erratically and causing problems.

Will we see progress stop within the decade?

If there’s one thing I’ve always believed in, it’s human ingenuity. The indomitable human spirit is very difficult to break, especially when it comes to scientific progress. It would be easy to say that we will stop seeing improvements by the time we get 1 nm phones but I honestly do not believe that to be true.

ASML will come up with something crazier or someone will invent a completely novel method for manufacturing chips. Who knows, we may even see radical science fiction concepts brought to life. I, for one, would love to see the sophons from the ‘The Three-Body Problem’ become a reality.

In case you’re unaware, sophons are “unfolded” protons on which circuitry is engraved before folding them back into their original size. The concept requires string theory to be true so a proton’s higher dimensions can be unfolded and then folded away to hide the circuitry.

But, long story short, I don’t think 1 nm chips will be the end of smartphone innovation. We may see drastically slowed progress soon but there will still be progress. At least I hope so: I’m still waiting on a consumer version of Meta’s Orion glasses.

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Abdullah loves smartphones, Virtual Reality, and audio gear. Though he covers a wide range of news his favorite is always when he gets to talk about the newest VR venture or when Apple sets the industry ablaze with another phenomenal release.