Industry Expert Blogs

In 1965 Gordon Moore first published his famous observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every year (in 1975 revised the timeline to every two years). Moore based his observation on just a handful of integrated circuits, the biggest of which had less than 100 transistors. Today, several production chips contain over a billion transistors , serving as one of the most astonishing examples of exponential growth in the history of technology. Superlatives abound for this trend, but one of my favorites is this: last year, human beings produced about 100 transistors for every ant on the planet. Predictions that Moore’s Law is running out of gas or is otherwise finished have been around for almost as long as the law itself, but the trend keeps on going. Lately, though, things are looking ominous. Is Moore’s law finally done?