Electronics researchers have developed a new way to stack transistors in a die, to keep Moore's law alive for as long as possible

A 300 millimetre silicon wafer in the clean rooms at the Globalfoundries fabrication (fab) plant in Dresden, Germany, on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2021. .

For 60 years, Gordon Moore's observation that transistor counts in integrated circuits would double roughly every two years has been spookily accurate. Ever-smaller transistors and ever-larger chips have made this possible, but with the physical limits of both impacting the growth of computing, new methods are required to continue the growth. One semiconductor research team claims to have achieved just that by stacking not chips or dies, but individual transistors.

The work by the team at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia was published in Nature Electronics (via El País), and as is always the case for such academic research, it's all very complicated. Basically, though, it comes down to the idea that chip makers are looking to go up, rather than using smaller transistors or wider dies, to keep Moore's 'law' alive.