Moore's law

- Moore's Law, the law that defines the development of integrated circuit functionality and complexity

One of the amazing facets of the electronics and semiconductor industries is the phenomenal speed with which integrated circuit developments are made. Feature sizes on chips become smaller by the year and the number of transistors rises. Today it is amazing that Moore's Law, first proposed in 1965 still holds good despite the considerable advancements that have been made in semiconductor integrated circuit design

Moore's Law defined
It was in 1965, only four years after the first planar integrated circuit was made that Gordon Moore, then director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor wrote a paper that was published in Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965. Although in the early days of integrated circuit technology, Moore had observed the fact that the number of transistors that could be incorporated in a single integrated circuit was rising at a very swift rate. In his paper he predicted that the transistor density of integrated circuits would double every two years. In turn this would result in decreased costs and improved performance. This observation has now become known as Moore's Law throughout the industry. He also stated within the article: "With unit cost falling as the number of components per circuit rises, by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip." This seemed an unbelievable feat at the time.

Since 1969 people have predicted that insurmountable barriers are about to be approached beyond which it will not be possible to proceed, and as a result Moore's Law would cease to be applicable. Yet each time this has happened, solutions have been found and the relentless development of semiconductor development has proceeded. It is believed by many that the trend will continue for a number of years yet. With Pentium ® 4 processors containing around 42 million transistors, this is a far cry from the technology that was available in 1965. In fact, viewing the number of transistors in some of the integrated circuits of the leading manufacturers shows that Moore's Law has held incredibly well since Moore first put forward the idea.

Now developments are being made into new areas such as photonics, and nano-technology is also becoming a reality. With tremendous amounts being invested into the development of semiconductor technology, the prediction that Moore's Law will hold until at least 2010 seems assured.

Moore
Dr Gordon Moore, the person who postulated what is now termed Moore's Law, was co-founder of Intel. He earned a B.S degree in chemistry from the University of California and then went on to gain a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from California Institute of Technology. He was one of the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and was director of research from 1959. He then went on to co-found Intel.