Like many others in 2021, Avi Messica and Ziv Leshem saw that scaling down the size of CMOS circuits—the historical driver of Moore’s Law—was reaching the end of its road. “We wanted to do something about it,” says Messica, CEO of Israeli startup NeoLogic. “Since we don’t own a fab we thought of taking a different approach to taking the industry further down the road.”
Their solution will be getting a hard look later this year when the first CPUs built using their new technology are manufactured. Called Quasi-CMOS, the approach uses some elements of a logic scheme last popular in the 1980s to produce designs that should be up to 40 percent smaller and 50 percent more energy efficient than those built using today’s logic.