A Brief History of Chips - Moore's Law
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As the process improvements were being made, Gordon Moore of Intel Corporation recognized a developing trend. In an article published in the April 19, 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits," he observed "The complexity for minimum component cost has increased by a factor of two per year," and projected that rate to hold in the short term, and maybe even for the next ten years. In 1975, Moore projected a doubling only every two years, although that has been repeated misquoted as "every 18 months." This led directly to the most common formulation of Moore's "Law" (so dubbed by Caltech professor and VLSI champion Carver Mead) which forecast the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every 18 months.
As the semiconductor industry continued to increase the number of transistors on integrated circuits generation after generation in rough accordance with Moore's Law, this "law" became more of a "goal." It was recognized that even if your company failed to keep pace with Moore's Law, your competitors likely would, and your company would be at an ever increasing competitive disadvantage. Several times, seemingly insurmountable technical barriers to keeping pace with Moore's Law have been overcome.
In observing the number of transistors packed into Intel microprocessors from the lowly 4004 to today's Itanium II, Moore's Law as stated by Gordon Moore in 1975 (as doubling every two years) seems to hold true even through the current generation of integrated circuits. However, there are yet more seemingly insurmountable technical barriers ahead.
In the next article, I will touch on analog and mixed signal integrated circuits and discuss the continued evolution of technology during the rise of the microprocessor and the system-on-a-chip.
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