© Ascannio / Shutterstock
Moore’s Law was a prediction made 57 years ago by US engineer Gordon Moore – he forecast that the number of transistors per silicon chip would double every year. Despite his theory dating back to 1965, it remains relevant today.
Moore studied at the University of California and earned a PhD in chemistry and physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1954. After graduating, he joined the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland.
Birth of Moore’s Law
Asked to predict developments in the electronics industry for the journal, Electronics, in 1965, Moore observed how the total number of components in the circuits had approximately doubled each year. This led him to project that the annual doubling would continue for the next ten years. This meant the number of microcircuits on a silicon chip would total 65,000 by 1975.
Since his prediction back in 1965, the number of transistors on each chip has increased from 100 to almost 50 billion. It follows that the size of the components has shrunk significantly.
Magazines began referring to his theory as Moore’s Law and it became the golden rule of the electronics industry as a result of his incredible foresight.
Complexity of circuits
This dramatic growth in the complexity of circuits was made possible only due to the steady shrinking of transistors over a period of several decades.
Moore, born in 1929, had been particularly fascinated by the potential of the transistor. In his youth, it was a recent invention and its value in aiding the development of practical manufacturing techniques was yet to be realised.
He had started work at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in California in 1956. William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning joint inventor of the transistor, had founded the laboratory to research methods of manufacturing silicon-based transistors. Moore and seven colleagues later joined forces with Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation to launch a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.
Moore was keen to enter the transistor business and in 1957, thanks to Fairchild’s financial backing and investments from every new founding member, the company became a major transistor manufacturer.
As the director of research and development, he achieved many technological developments during his career, but he will always be remembered for Moore’s Law.
Shrinking transistors
Back in the late 1940s and early ’50s, the dimensions of a transistor were measured in millimetres. By the early 2010s, they were usually measured in tens of nanometres (one-billionth of a metre), equating to a 100,000 times reduction.
This has enabled the number of transistors measuring one-millionth of a metre to rocket since the 1980s – the decade when dynamic random-access memory chips started to offer megabyte storage capacities.
Thanks to further advances in technology, the manufacture of gigabyte memory chips and microprocessors that could operate at gigahertz frequencies was possible by the start of the 21st century,
In the second decade of the 21st century, Moore’s law continued to be relevant even when three-dimensional transistors, tens of nanometres in size, were developed.
Considering Moore’s Law was conceived 57 years ago, there is almost no other sector in industry that has shown the same consistent level of development for so long.
Chips feed binary units or bit of data into logic gates in different combinations. More gates have led to a faster rate of computation, offering increasingly powerful uses over the decades.