Yesterday morning I ran across what sounded like an interesting story from Hewlett-Packard's labs that seemed to involve a possible transistor replacement, nanotechnology, and the indefinite furtherance of Moore's Law. I ultimately decided to skip it, though, because on further inspection it turned out that the story has implications for the somewhat niche area of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and even those implications are pretty far off (around 2020). But, since the rest of the tech press has picked up this FPGA research as an "OMG nanotechnology and Moore's Law!" story, I've decided to talk about the story anyway, and to look at what is and isn't there.

You can always count on Ars for a sane discussion of what technical announcements actually mean. There are some good details in this article. My opinion is that FPGA's are extremely important and will eventually be a part of common PCs, but currently they fit niche and development applications. The press seems to think that this announcement has something to do with microprocessors. It doesn't.

Hewlett-Packard's FPGA research, and replacing transistors