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The Shaughnessy Report: Moore's Law Turns 50

Let’s all pause to wish Moore’s Law a very happy 50^th birthday, even as the vultures begin to circle overhead.

Fifty years ago, Dr. Gordon E. Moore was director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, and Electronics Magazine asked him to make some predictions about the future of the semiconductor industry. On April 19, 1965, the magazine published his earthshaking article outlining what became known as Moore’s Law.

In the article, titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Moore posited that the number of components in a dense integrated circuit had doubled every year, and would continue at that rate for at least 10 years. Before he knew it, electronics companies around the globe were using Moore’s Law for their technology roadmaps. It has become more than a target; it is one of the predominant driving forces in the electronics industry. In 1975, Moore amended his prediction from one year to approximately every two years. (Interestingly, Moore didn’t come up with the term Moore’s Law; that honor belongs to Caltech’s Carver Mead.)

Moore went on to be a co-founder and CEO of Intel Corporation. He’s had a great life; he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a $5 billion endowment. In 2001, the couple donated $600 million to Caltech, the biggest single gift ever given to a college, and in 2007 they gave $200 million to Caltech and the University of California to fund the Thirty Meter Telescope, to be built on Mauna Kae in Hawaii.

But all this time, Moore knew his law would hit a manufacturing wall. He once said, “It can’t continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.”

Now, as Moore’s Law celebrates the big Five-O, technologists are predicting that the law will expire in the next decade. Chip companies are spending billions trying to identify the next material, or a new way to make chips. 

To read this entire column, which appeared in the April 2015 issue of The PCB Design Magazine, click here.