though CMOS would still live longer..but at some point, I will largely agree with mr Samueli. Supplement materials to silicon (or in different forms?) are inevitable. And as someone mentioned, architecture has now bigger stake to make performance enhancement in chips.
Folks, Moore's "Law" isn't, and never was, a physical law, like Newton's Laws, or Ohm's Law. It merely described an historical trend that persisted for a surprisingly long time. Eventually it runs up against practical or even theoretical limits.
Am I missing something here? I'm no expert on this, but (as the article states) Moores law relates to the NUMBER of transistors on a chip, not their size. Size is what has driven it thus far, but it seems we're only seeing the beginning of 3D chips. Double the number of layers every couple of years and you'll keep it going a while longer??
The annual prediction of the end of "Moore's Law" is part of what motivates the extraordinary efforts to creatively push the inevitable a little further down the track. Semiconductor management doesn't want the fall of "Moore's Law" to occur on their watch. The "law" has become a driving force for innovation - a self fulfilling prophesy.
Scaling will continue at some rate forever. And "more than Moore" approaches (like using graphene and 3D structures) may improve device performance over time as well. However, the strict definition of Moores law says we will double the number of transitors every two years. Right now IC technology leader Intel is transitioning from the 22 to 14 nm node. Will they make it in two years? Will the number of tranisistors actually double? And how many different designs will actually be manufactured at this node within the next two years? I would submit that Moores law is likely "breaking" as I write this post, or is already broken.
Hopefully Moore's law will get us to the Singularity and then the machines will figure out what to do next. And maybe keep us around as pets, we are kind of entertaining after-all. Not engineers but regular people. ;)
Another angle to look at this would be the energy consumption which have scaled some what to the low side but that is not enough. If a meaningful and sustainable joule/bit or a suitable figure-of-merit thereof is not met, network bandwidth scaling will stop, inevitably.