How Moore's Law Changed History (and Your Smartphone)
Source: Damon Poeter
Gordon Moore/Credit: Intel
After 50 years, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prediction about semiconductor miniaturization still holds up.
When I was a kid, I got an idea from a puzzle book which I believed in my childlike way would make me fabulously wealthy in just a few weeks. The trick was to convince my mother to pay me a progressively doubling wage for doing household chores for a month―a penny on the first day, two cents on the second, four on the third, and so on.
Unfortunately for me, my mom was too bright to take me up on the offer. So I missed out on collecting $10.7 million and change after 30 days of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and the like. Fortunately for all of us, the semiconductor industry did accept Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore's challenge to do something similar 50 years ago―and we continue to reap the benefits today.
Back in 1965, Moore, then the director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked by Electronics magazine to submit an article making a prediction for developments in the semiconductor component industry over the following decade. So for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics published on April 19, 1965, Moore noted that the number of transistor and resistor elements on computer chips had been doubling roughly every year―and that he expected this to keep happening for the next 10 years.
It was a prediction that ended up extending far past its first decade. And what later became known as "Moore's Law" would prove to be perhaps the most reliable and enduring guide to the pace of technological advance in not just the semiconductor business, but in the computing industry as a whole.
But back in April 1965, Moore's observation, accompanied with a simple graph he'd sketched, wasn't even regarded as cover story material in Electronics. Instead, you had to thumb forward to page 99 to find the Intel co-founder's prophetic pronouncement amidst the writings of other industry experts. For just 75 cents, you'd have had the very first iteration of Moore's Law in your grubby hands, but finding it wasn't easy.
Electronics Magazine Cover/Credit: IntelIn an interview earlier this year, Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968 with the late Robert Noyce, explained how the whole thing came about after Electronics asked him for the article.
"I took the opportunity to look at what had happened up to that time. This would have been in 1964, I guess. And I looked at the few chips we had made and noticed we went from a single transistor on a chip to a chip with about eight elements―transistors and resistors―on it," said the 86-year-old chairman emeritus of Intel.
"The new chips coming out had about twice the number of elements, about 16. And in the laboratory, we were creating chips with about 30 elements and we were looking at the possibility of making chips with twice that many, around 60 elements on a chip. Well, I plotted these on a piece of semi-log paper starting with the planar transistor in 1959 and noticed that, essentially, we were doubling every year.
"So I took a wild extrapolation and said we're going to continue doubling every year and go from about 60 elements at the time to 60,000 in 10 years."
To make things even more interesting, Moore himself did not at the time regard this remarkable prediction of exponential growth in integrated circuit (IC) complexity to be the most important point of his article. Instead, he was trying to stress that making ICs was going to get cheaper to do over time―potentially, a whole lot cheaper.
"I was just trying to communicate the point that this was the direction semiconductors were going," he said. "And this was going to give a tremendous cost advantage, which wasn't true at the time. The early integrated circuits cost quite a bit more than the pieces to assemble the similar circuits out of individual components.
"But one could see the trend was going in the direction that this was going to be the cheaper way eventually. That was my real objective―to communicate that we have a technology that's going to make electronics cheap. But I didn't expect this binary order of magnitude increase, the thousand-fold increase in complexity to be very accurate."
The accelerated pace of early IC manufacturing slowed a bit in ensuing years. Moore later revised his timetable for the doubling of transistor density in microchips from one year to two. More recently, we've seen the cadence at which Intel and other leading semiconductor manufacturers ramp new process technologies range from about 18 to 32 months.
Making Moore's Law Happen
Of course, the continued relevance of Moore's Law hasn't just happened by magic. Moore's prediction, while remaining accurate for 50 years, isn't actually a natural "law" like the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Shrinking the size of elements on computer chips so consistently and for so many decades has required incredible innovations like CMOS, silicon straining, VLSI, immersion lithography, high-k dielectrics, and most recently, FinFET or tri-gate "3D" transistor process technology. Those advances didn't just appear out of thin air because Moore's Law demanded they happen―brilliant, doggedly persistent people working in labs at universities and companies like Bell, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild, Intel, Toshiba, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, TSMC, Samsung, and elsewhere invented them and thus helped extend Moore's Law, not the other way around.
Moore made his original prediction about the pace of miniaturization in computer chip components as a way to highlight the attractive economics in semiconductor manufacturing. By his own admission, he wasn't terribly confident that it would hold up over time. But in the ensuing decades, Moore's Law has become as much a challenge to the industry to keep it alive as an axiom for how chipmaking works.
I never managed to trick my mom into paying me a fortune to make my bed for a month. But 50 years ago, Moore set the wheels in motion for an entire industry to dedicate itself to producing increasingly complex integrated circuits to make progressively more powerful computers and devices. As a child, I thought it would be really cool if I could use math to turn a penny into millions. Way cooler―and far more beneficial to all of us―is that we've turned transistors that were once the size of a human hand into nanoscale electronic switches powering smartphone supercomputers we can fit in our pockets.
Moore's Law has presided over that astonishing process of human ingenuity for the past 50 years. It's still holding up even as we approach atomic-scale limitations in making circuitry even smaller than it is today―a possible end of the road for Moore's enduring insight, or perhaps just the next great challenge.
| }
|