Moore’s Law is… well, a law of sorts. It’s more of an observation, but one that has held true for quite some time. It’s now so embedded in the psyche of the industry that failing to satisfy Moore’s Law is thought to be the second sign of the apocalypse (the first was Mac OS X on x86).

Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of features on a silicon chip doubles every 18 months. Silicon chips are made using photolithography, which is, at its heart, a process that involves making a photographic image of the circuit on a silicon wafer. The smallest feature is limited by how small a dot of light you can make with your imaging system, which faces a fundamental limit called the diffraction limit. Using a normal optical system, there is no getting around it. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t do an end-run around the diffraction limit, and a recent bit of research