A Second Law After Moore
June 29, 2023

Moore’s Law describes the scaling of semiconductor integration. Brian Greenforest’s second law starts with a different active device: a switch that uses neither semiconductors nor ferromagnetic materials and works from visible teaching scale toward nanoscale fabrication.

The simple structure offers a maker-friendly path through ordinary PCB methods or two-filament PLA printing, while preserving a route to photolithographic density.

A Switch Without the Fairchild Process

The device serves the functional role of a vacuum tube without vacuum, cathode heating, or a positive work-function emission material. Its architecture creates nonlinearity through a simpler material system.

At millimeter scale, students can fabricate and inspect the switch directly. At smaller geometries, the same mechanism can enter dense digital logic without changing its conceptual form.

Teach Large, Fabricate Small, Scale Fast

Room-temperature operation makes the technology accessible. Cryogenic operation offers a research path toward far higher switching frequencies, including the terahertz range Brian identifies for quantum-laboratory conditions.

Materials scientists, RF engineers, educators, process developers, and investors can characterize the device across scale and turn it into the active element for locally manufacturable computation.

Build the Fabrication Path Behind A Second Law After Moore

The Missing Maker Fab carries this work into the tools and processes required to fabricate fast active devices locally.

The Missing Maker Fab

Originally posted on LinkedIn

Brian Greenforest · (2023-06-29 00:53:34 UTC)

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Everyone is talking about Moore's law, but few know that there's a Second Law. As a researcher in alternative chip technology, I invented a process that does not use semiconductors, nor it depends on ferromagnetic materials. A very simple switch design, surprisingly simple to explain. An equivalent to the ordinary vacuum tube, but it doesn't need vacuum, nor it has a positive work function to pull electrons out from the cathode (no heating, no special materials). As a matter of fact, it can even be 3D printed via a 2-filament PLA printer, or made of ordinary PCB, so it's incredibly maker-friendly. It does not require cryo to run, but can easily be pushed into terahertz range if you've got liquid nitrogen or a quantum lab. Of course, you still will need photolythography, but the same switch will work being in the scale of millimeters, down to nanometers—so you can teach your EE students digital logic design on an enlarged version of your "chip."

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