The biggest impediment to our technological future isn"t extending Moore"s law. Thanks to recent breakthroughs at the semiconductor manufacturing level, by 2010 top-tier processors should be stuffed with a billion transistors and running at more than 20 gigahertz. No, the biggest challenge to progress is much more ordinary: It"s battery life. What good is a super-functional cell phone if it runs out of juice after 20 minutes? Or a laptop supercomputer that weighs 15 pounds and singes your thighs?
The problem can be stated in a single word: wireless. When Intel cofounder Gordon Moore made his famous proclamation in 1965, he may have anticipated the existence of untethered electronics. But in those days of core memory and wired logic, integrated circuits were seen as astounding breakthroughs in energy conservation. No one could have imagined that billions of chips would be in use, each packed with millions of transistors - and that so many of the chips would unplug themselves from the wall.