San Francisco - Mar 21, 2007 - A recent Reuters article poses the possibility that Moore's Law (technically, it's an axiom, maxim or postulate) is on the verge of being broken when it comes to memory. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors that could be housed on a given area of silicon doubles every two years. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man who suggested the concept, later reduced the time period to 18 months. He posed this concept in 1965.

The Reuters article notes that while processors are still following Moore's concept, memory circuits have reached such a minute scale that further reductions in physical space are just not possible. Memory chips use pools of charged electrons to store data. As the number of electrons in each pool shrinks, it gets harder to read the stored data. Memory circuits currently can be as small as 50 nanometers.

Development of new data storage systems are currently in development, and as the demand for greater capacity increases, these new systems may be called for sooner than later. Before long, life may once again emulate Star Trek when bio-neural gel packs are used to store gigaquads of data.