One way to save Moore's Law from an unpleasant and industry-disrupting demise is for manufacturing process technology developers to make a series of changes at a given node – say 20-nm – but label each successive change with a smaller number.
In that way double patterning of deep immersion lithography can continue to produce chips that are in processes technologies that are labeled 16-nm, 14-nm, 10-nm and so on, thereby keeping Moore's law moving forward.
And as long as some feature on the chip can be measured at the
appropriate dimension it should be possible to find a way to justify the
label.[Get a 10% discount on ARM TechCon 2012 conference passes by using promo code EDIT. Click here to learn about the show and register.]
Of course, the IC die-area savings and cost advantages that we have become used to from previous process node transitions would not accrue with these forthcoming node transitions. However, as chip designers at the leading edge are becoming more interested in power savings than area savings as long as the successive process nodes produce ICs with lower power consumption all may be well.