Just like Moore's law, which is also hitting a wall.

Moore's Law has been hitting - and going through - walls for the last 30 years.

True, but you can only handwave away the size of atoms for so long.

We are somewhat far away from being restricted by the size of single atoms.

A silicon atom is 0.2 nanometers and the smallest single transistors used in recent chips is in the order of 5-10 nanometers.

Also, using photons instead of electrons does allow you, almost literally to handwave away he size of atoms. How exactly, is unknown today.

Silicon lithography has to hit a wall way before single atom sizes. For a start, silicon semiconducting is a probabilistic effect and only happen on populations.

Photons at usable frequencies are much larger than atoms. Just notice that lithography is currently moving into what they call "extreme UV" (and most people call X-rays) because the UV photons are much larger than the features of current top of line chips.

>For a start, silicon semiconducting is a probabilistic effect and only happen on populations

Is that a fundamental theoretical limit like the uncertainty principles or is it a matter of engineering advancements to figure out how these forces work? I can imagine carefully positioning two atoms (maybe moving?) to obtain similar effects.

That leaves about 13 years left until Moore’s Law hits that 0.2 nm feature. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.