Gordon Moore is undoubtedly most respected scientist in the field of Electronics. Mr. Moore is credited with founding Intel Inc. and postulating the Law for Semi-conductor Industry. On 19th April 1965 Moore published a paper titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” in electronics Magazine. Moore wrote the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year and the same will continue to happen for a decade. His statement has remained truth for 5 long decades.
The Statement was so profound that the Industry actually started calling it Moore’s Law. Moore relaxed his statement later and said that the rate of growth would double every two year instead of every year. Moore’s law should be treated more of an observation rather than a natural law. Moore’s law has helped pack more transistors in a chip at roughly the same cost every other year.
This has been made possible because of the advancement in technology of VLSI, CMOS, and recent technology advancement in tri-gate 3D transistor technology. The design of the chips has gone at the level of Nano-meter with Intel releasing a 14nm chip this year. They were also able to achieve better power utilization and heat dissipation in these chips.
The Moore’s law has helped the modern semi-conductor industry to help itself realign and perform better. The modern electronics found in day to day objects such as Mobile Phones, Portal Music Player, Digital Camera, Handhelds, Watches, Servers, Routers, etc. has been possible only because of the exponential improvement of digital electronics.
Moore’s law may soon be passé as it is being becoming more and more difficult to actually add more transistors on current chip. It is becoming more and more expensive to design and test a chip. It has been estimated that the cost of designing and testing a chip has increased 9% year on year because of complex design.
With more complex systems such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Speech Recognition in devices, 3D modeling, Smart Cities the need for more powerful chips is increasing day by day. Moore law is still holding and we can expect the barrier of Nano-meter chips to be broken with much smaller form factor chips.
Thoughts of Mr Gordan Moore on the completion of his achievement of 50 years can be seen through this video:
