Running into the buffers - [electronics silicon]

Exponentials never last forever. Sooner or later, silicon transistors are going to stop getting smaller, if only because it's tough to make one with less than an atom of silicon in it. The reality is that conventional silicon transistors will stop shrinking sometime before that happens. But how much sooner? The end of the scaling of complementary metal-on- semiconductor (CMOS) silicon transistors could come as soon as a few generations from now.