The future of computing is under the spotlight at the Institute of Physics’ Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference at the Royal Holloway College of the University of London on 26-28 March.The end of the silicon chip The silicon chip, which has supplied several decades’ worth of remarkable increases in computing power and speed, looks unlikely to be capable of sustaining this pace for more than another decade — in fact, in a plenary talk at the conference, Suman Datta of Pennsylvania State University, USA, gives the conventional silicon chip no longer than four years left to run.