Moore’s Law; Will transistors eventually reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic level?

Moore’s Law, a computing term which is used in the semiconductor industry to help in long term planning as well as research and development in the industry was first coined by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel Corporation. The law, which is prediction or rather an observation, states that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. In simple terms this means the processing power and speed of computers will double every two years. This remarkable observation was preceded by a number of inventions and innovations by scientists and engineers. These inventions and innovations played critical role in the advancement of integrated circuits. For example, the invention and advancement of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor made possible extremely dense and high performance ICs that are in use today.

Chip

With this possibility of putting millions of these tiny switches (transistors) on a chip the computing powers and speed has gone to unprecedented level. The invention of the DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) made it easier to fabricate single transistor memory cells. Its the invention of DRAM and flash memory that made feasible the manufacturing of low-cost and high capacity memory we have today. As the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip increases since the Intel 4004 in 1970 the question arises how long before we reach the limits of miniaturization of these tiny switches otherwise known as transistors. Or could there be something revolutionary in the pipeline?