Word: silicones
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...secret behind Moore's law is that chipmakers double every 18 months or so the number of transistors that can be crammed onto a silicon wafer the size of a fingernail. They do this by etching microscopic grooves onto crystalline silicon with beams of ultraviolet radiation. A typical wire in a Pentium chip is now 1/500 the width of a human hair; the insulating layer is only 25 atoms thick...
...laws of physics suggest that this doubling cannot be sustained forever. Eventually transistors will become so tiny that their silicon components will approach the size of molecules. At these incredibly tiny distances, the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics take over, permitting electrons to jump from one place to another without passing through the space between. Like water from a leaky fire hose, electrons will spurt across atom-size wires and insulators, causing fatal short circuits...
...word is known. The search for a successor to silicon has become a kind of crusade; it is the Holy Grail of computation. Among physicists, the race to create the Silicon Valley for the next century has already begun. Some of the theoretical options being explored...
...MOLECULAR AND DOT COMPUTERS Other exotic designs include the molecular computer and the quantum dot computer (which replace the silicon transistor with a single molecule and a single electron, respectively). But these approaches face formidable technical problems, such as mass-producing atomic wires and insulators. No viable prototypes yet exist...
Clearly, none of these designs are ready for prime time. Most are still on the drawing board, and even those with working prototypes are too crude to rival the convenience and efficiency of silicon...