Mike:

Thanks much for the update. As I think I mentioned earlier, I am so glad I am an observer of the semiconductor industry and its related dependents, as opposed to being a participant as I was for five decades.

Carried to its perhaps illogical extreme, one day they will be illuminating wafer masks with cosmic rays, assuming that Rayleigh's Limit still holds at those wavelengths. That may be the point at which Moore's Law finally fails. I don't exclude anything from the realm of possibility any more. There are so many truly clever people out there with tools we never dreamed of in the core memory and discrete component days. My earliest computers had clock times in the tens of milliseconds. Remember processor "wait states"?

Mother Nature always has a few surprises for us. One of my favorite personal speculations relates to the dark energy/matter question, and the accelerating expansion rate of the universe. I suspect that Mother Nature, in perhaps her finest irony, made the yet to be confirmed gravitron and its antiparticle mutually repellent instead of mutually attractive as is the case with every other known particle/antiparticle pair. Wouldn't that be a hoot and a half? It would give the folks at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe something to pursue following their anticipated confirmation of the Higgs Boson.

Stay tuned ...

Regards,

HBB in Phoenix, Arizona
Nikonian Team Member

Photography is a journey with no conceivable destination.