So what's going on with Moore's Law, which states that transistor density on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months? For Gordon Moore, as in... Moore's law... we have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit.

But today at a panel on the "Future of the Electronics Industry” hosted during the DesignCon conference, Cadence CTO Ted Vucurevich's prediction, although in Moore's range, was less optimistic. According to the Cadence exec, "traditional scaling" as we know it will hit a wall in 12 years. Beyond that, "vertical scaling" which is the action of stacking up chips could be the way to go, although those chips will be much more complex to design and build.

"From a purely technological point of view we figure that you will not be able to use any known form of removal heat being able to go beyond about 1 nanometre in terms of devices [...] But the interconnects do not scale anywhere close to that same level and that's going to cause us some interesting challenges [...] I don't know if we're going to see practical scaling much beyond the 6 nanometres node [...] So i put kind of the end of traditional silicon based probably around 2020", Vucurevich said.

I also liked Vucurevich comments about the iPhone, not being that technologically advanced as some would think.

"The iPhone doesn't represent leading edge technology in almost any dimension when you look at that phone!"