After almost a year of involvement with the Extropic team, it has become clear that their talent and insight are unparalleled, encompassing a unique set of competencies allowing them to reimagine compute. This comes at a major moment for Extropic as they recently unveiled the existence of their printed thermodynamic microchip1 and circuit board. This fundamental milestone is only the beginning of Extropic's journey towards civilizational impact.
The Answer to the End of Moore’s Law - Thermodynamics
For over half a century, computing has advanced at an exponential rate, following the densification of transistors along the trajectory observed by Moore’s Law - the doubling of transistors on a microchip every two years (initially every 18 months) outlined in Gordon's aptly titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”2 The question now is: what happens when we can no longer cram more transistors into a chip?
The golden age of transistor growth is now reaching the constraints of atomic scale, EUV printing limits, and Nyquist noise.3 As semiconductor fabs struggle to push nanometer accuracy and AI workloads drive energy demands to unsustainable levels, the industry has responded by continuously scaling costs and input investments—the solution has been simply more chips and more energy.
Enter Extropic, a company rewriting the fundamental rules of computation. Instead of fighting against the thermal noise that limits the continued processing gains of traditional semiconductors, Extropic harnesses it.
