IC: I wanted to ask you about going beyond silicon. We've been working on silicon now for 50+ years, and the silicon paradigm has been continually optimized. Do you ever think about what’s going to happen beyond silicon, if we ever reach a theoretical limit within our lifetime? Or will anything get there, because it won’t have 50 years of catch-up optimization?
JK: Oh yeah. Computers started, you know, with Abacuses, right? Then mechanical relays. Then vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits. Now the way we build transistors, it's like a 12th generation transistor. They're amazing, and there's more to do. The optical guys have been actually making some progress, because they can direct light through polysilicon, and do some really interesting switching things. But that's sort of been 10 years away for 20 years. But they actually seem to be making progress.
It’s like the economics of biology. It’s 100 million times cheaper to make a complicated molecule than it is to make a transistor. The economics are amazing. Once you have something that can replicate proteins - I know a company that makes proteins for a living, and we did the math, and it was literally 100 million times less capital per molecule than we spent on transistors. So when you print transistors it’s something interesting because they're organized and connected in very sophisticated ways and in arrays. But our bodies are self-organizing - they get the proteins exactly where they need to be. So there's something amazing about that. There's so much room, as Feynman said, at the bottom, of how chemicals are made and organized, and how they’re convinced to go a certain way.
I was talking to some guys who were looking at doing a quantum computing startup, and they were using lasers to quiet down atoms, and hold them in 3D grids. It was super cool. So I think we've barely scratched the surface on what's possible. Physics is so complicated and apparently arbitrary that who the hell knows what we're going to build out of it. So yeah, I think about it. It could be that we need an AI kind of computation in order to organize the atoms in ways that takes us to that next level. But the possibilities are so unbelievable, it's literally crazy. Yeah I think about that.
IC: If you have more than 100 people, you need to split into two abstraction layers?
JK: Exactly. There are reasons for that, like human beings are really good at tracking. Your inner circle of friends is like 10-20 people, it's like a close family, and then there is this kind of 50 to 100 depending on how it's organized, that you can keep track of. But above that, you read everybody outside your group of 100 people as semi-strangers. So you have to have some different contracts about how you do it. Like when we built Zen, we had 200 people, and half the team at the front end and half the team at the back end. The interface between them was defined, and they didn't really have to talk to each other about the details behind the contract. That was important. Now they got along pretty good and they worked together, but they didn't constantly have to go back and forth across that boundary.
there's a funny thing - I realized that at the locus of innovation, we tend to think of TSMC, Samsung, and Intel as the process leaders. But a lot of the leadership is actually in the equipment manufacturers like ASML, and in materials. If you look at who is building the innovative stuff, and the EUV worldwide sales, the number is something like TSMC is going to buy like 150 EUV machines by 2023 or something like that. The numbers are phenomenal because even a few years ago not many people were even sure that EUV was going to work. But now there's X-ray lithography coming up, and again, you can say it's impossible, but bloody everything has been impossible! The fine print, this what Richard Feynman said - he's kind of smart. He said ‘there's lots of room at the bottom’, and I personally can count, and if you look at how many atoms are across transistors, there's a lot. If you look at how many transistors you actually need to make a junction, without too many quantum effects, there are only 10. So there is room there.
Yeah, I didn't know about ASML before reading this. They are Dutch!
These 4 letter acronym companies sneak up on you :P