Moore’s law

Moore’s law, was a concept introduced during the Embedded systems seminar. A prediction in 1965 by Gordon Moore sated that transistor density would doubled approximately every two years. This was a rather interesting concept since the exponential growth of transistor density had many technological applications in computer systems and more significantly, embedded system. However what I found to be even more intriguing was that it eventually became self-fulfilling. This meant the prediction was true because it existed (the industry tried to follow this trend and hence made it true).

While searching, I came across a few interesting “Myths” regarding Moore’s law. “Transistor density doubles every 18 months” This prediction apparently common was never laid down by Moore. “Moore came up with it(Moore’s law) while driving down high 101” He says he came up with it while preparing an article for Electronics magazine. Postulating that Moore’s law faces the threat of running aground since the world no longer requires more powerful computers. This was actually derived from a quote by Google CEO Eric Schimidt saying: relies on less-than-cutting edge servers because the industry is “simply too efficient”. This however is untrue since without Moore’s law, Google would have to triple the area of its server farms or run the search engine at a crawl.

Moore’s second law states that the price of semiconductor fabrication would also increase exponentially in the same time frame. This is due to the fact that advancing semiconductor technology requires materials such as photoresist and other polymers, derivatives of petroleum and hence subjected to it’s cost and supply. Moore however sates that he never made such a prediction.

Moore’s law is dead. According to Gordon Moore: “It (Moore’s law) can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens”. The scale of transistors on semiconductors are approaching the atomic scale for which Moore states is the fundamental limit. When asked if Nanotechnology would replace electronics Moore believes they are different and while it does have an impact on semiconductors, it will not directly replace electronics. This however, is predicted only to occur 10 or 20 years in the future.

Written by Kai Ren