Moore’s Law: What is Gordon Moore’s projection and is it valid?

Gordon Moore, a tech industry titan, passed away on Friday at the age of 94. The co-founder of Intel became famous for the fact that “Moore’s law”.

What is Moore’s Law?

Gordon Moore showed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every two years.

In 1965, Moore calculated that the number of transistors would double every year. This forecast for a special issue of the magazine was given by the then director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor. Electronics. In 1975, he adjusted his forecast every two years.

In a 2015 interview, Moore was proud.

“The integrated circuit has been around for several years. The first ones entered the market with about 30 components on a chip (transistors, resistors, etc.). I went back to the beginning of what I thought was fundamental technology, the planar transistor, and realized that the number of components was doubling every year. And I made a crazy extrapolation saying that for the next 10 years it will double every year.”

And it turned out to be surprisingly correct. My colleague saw this and called it Moore’s law. It was applied not only to semiconductors. Everything that is changing exponentially today is called Moore’s law. I’m happy to take all the credit.”

It’s more than a law, it’s an observation and prediction that has guided the tech industry for decades.

Moore’s Law is dead?

In 2023, the industry is debating whether Moore’s law will be able to withstand It is no longer about thousands of chains, but about billions.

From Intelcompany co-founded by moore, it is expected to reach one trillion transistors by 2030, keeping the trend going.

“For the first 40 years, profits came mainly from innovation in our process. In the future, both technological innovation and packaging innovation will bring profit. Our processes will continue to deliver historic density improvements, while our 2D and 3D stacking technologies give architects and designers more tools to increase the number of transistors per device. As we look forward to breakthrough technologies such as High NA, RibbonFET, PowerVia, Foveros Omni and Direct and more, we see no end to innovation and therefore Moore’s Law.” Intel.

competing company AMD It is also predicted that Moore’s law stay alive

“I expect there will be exciting new transistor technology in the next six to eight years, and I am very, very clear about the improvements we are going to make to keep improving transistor technology, but they are more expensive,” Michael said. Papermaster, Chief Technology Officer AMDTo Register in 2022.

Instead, another semiconductor giant, NVIDIApostulates a different reality. Announcing his line of RTX 40 cards, Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEOkilled Moore’s law.

” Moore’s law she is dead. A 12″ plate is much more expensive today. The thought that the chip will fall in price is a thing of the past,” said Jensen Huang in September 2022.

but what did he say Moore? In a 2015 interview, he reflects on how difficult it will be to keep his law.

“Making things smaller is getting more and more expensive. Factories operating in new technological hubs are absurd. It’s hard to think that Intel started with a total capital of $3 million. Now you can’t buy a tool for such an amount, you can’t even install a tool, I don’t think so. Cars have become much more expensive and more complex. On the other hand, its performance in terms of transistors per unit time has increased dramatically. So we can still afford to build a few factories to use modern technology.”