Transistor Panic

Hey sister transistor, happy 60th birthday! Having another midlife crisis?

Every so often I come across some article forecasting the death of the transistor - usually a misinterpretation of Moore's Law and the eventual physical limitations of miniaturization. But it always seems to me to be displaced anxiety over our preoccupation with size: if it can't get any smaller/bigger, how can it get any better?

Isn't that an underestimation of human imagination? There are always physical limitations concerning industry - the remarkable thing is not that we encounter limitations, but that we surmount them in such imaginative ways. When clockmaking shrunk to pocket-watch size, we discovered that little caps of rubies and sapphires helped the ultrasmall moving components work consistently and smoothly. We didn't throw up our hands and proclaim the death of the timepiece.

Even Gordon Moore himself seems to acknowledge that physical limitations could throw us a technological cockblock, but that human ingenuity is no stranger to the seemingly-impossible:

"I can see (it lasting) another decade or so," he said of the phenomenon now known as Moore's Law. "Beyond that, things look tough. But that's been the case many times in the past."

What do you think - is this the end of 1s and 0s, or is the transistor here to stay?

Future uncertain for transistor on 60th birthday [CNN]