Stage: Moore's law appeared
Date: December 2, 1964
Where: San Francisco Bay Area
WHO: Gordon Moore
In a modest speech to a local professional society in 1964, computer scientist and chemist Gordon Moore made a prediction that would shape the world of technology for more than 50 years.
The final version of this prediction would become known as “Moore's Law“, and this will propel the progress of the semiconductor industry for decades to come.
Although it is called a law, it was a prediction based more on economic demands and industry trends than on the physical laws of nature.
Moore was director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductors when he gave the talk, and his goal was ultimately to sell more chips. At the time, computers were giant machines that took up an entire room, and integrated circuits, known as microchips, had somewhat limited practical applications.
The silicon transistor, the workhorse of computing, was invented just ten years ago, and the integrated circuit that made computers miniaturized was patented just five years earlier. In 1961, the electronics company RCA created a 16-transistor chip, and by 1964, General Microelectronics created chip with 120 transistors.
Moore witnessed this impressive progress and noticed that a mathematical rule seemed to govern this progress. This mathematical correlation was later given the name “Moore's Law” by others.
Although Moore outlined this principle in the Electrochemical Society in 1964, it received widespread support the following April when he was asked to write an editorial in the journal Electronics. In it he boldly predicted that as much as 65,000 components can be placed on a single chip – an unheard of figure at that time. That's a charmingly small number now, given that the company will unveil Chip with 4 trillion transistors.
In 1968, Moore co-founded chip manufacturer Intel, where his law of doubling evolved from a casual observation into a motivation for innovation.
Despite its name, Moore's Law has never been an ironclad rule. In 1975 Moore slowed down the rate of progress to doubling the number of transistors every two yearsand not every year. This more modest doubling rate would become the official Moore's Law, which would remain in effect for many years to come. This relentless pursuit of increased computing power and miniaturization is what makes virtually all modern electronics possible, from the personal computer to the smartphone.
For years people have been predicting that the law would become outdated, but it has proven remarkably resilient for quite some time.
“The fact that we were able to continue [Moore's law] taking such a long time surprised me more than anything,” Moore said in an interview. interview with the Electrochemical Society in 2016. “There always seems to be an insurmountable barrier in the way, but as we get closer to it, people find solutions.”
However, this principle eventually ceased to apply. It is unclear exactly when Moore's Law ceased to apply. In its canonical form, the standard probably died in 2016as it took Intel five years to move from 14nm technology to 10nm technology. Moore saw this happen as it happened several years before he died at the ripe old age of 94 in 2023.
Eventually, Moore's “law” had to run its course because it contradicted the actual laws of physics. As transistors got smaller, quantum mechanicsphysics, which controls very little, began to play a huge role. The world's smallest transistors can facing the challenges of “quantum tunneling”“, in which electrons from one tiny transistor can tunnel into another, thereby allowing current to flow in the transistors that should be in the “off” position.
As a result, chipmakers are racing to develop chips with new materials and new architectures. The following Moore's law can be applied to quantum computerswhich use quantum mechanics as a feature rather than a computational error.
