The other day a colleague sent me a party invitation. The headline was "HP Plans Retirement Party for Moore's Law." (Real retirement parties, of course, feature lovely cakes like this specimen, from the Carolina Cake Co., Hilliard, Ohio.)

Moore's Law has been buried more often than Dracula, but like Elvis it keeps coming back.

As I've written, the exponential improvements Moore first revealed in silicon have been replicated in optical fiber, in hard drives, in radios, across the technological universe. And it shows no sign of ending.

In fact, the "Retirement Party" was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a new Hewlett-Packard technology that could extend the life of Moore's Law improvements many, many years.

It's called a crossbar latch and in theory it's just a circuit line crossed by two other lines. But it's capable of performing the same functions as a circuit etched in silicon, and when made on nanoscale, it's more efficient.

The key is that the size of the crossbar latch can scale down further than today's circuits. They can be made smaller, thinner, run closer together, and hence, create more circuit density, which is what Moore's Law is all about.

Phil Kuekes, senior computer architect with HP's Quantum Science Research (QSR) group, has the patent (number 6,586,965 for those counting at home), and the party (actually a press conference) was held to celebrate the creation of a working, proven prototype.

Along with molecular-scale junctions and logic devices, the latch is the final piece needed to create useful computing in true nanoscale. Today's silicon components work at 90 nanometers and the next generation will run at 65 nanometers. Now we're talking single-digits.

Sounds like Moore's got a long way to go.