What is Moores Law?
The growth of complexity of integrated circuits follows a trend called “Moore’s Law”, first observed by Gordon Moore of Intel. Moore’s Law in its modern interpretation states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years. By the year 2000 the largest integrated circuits contained hundreds of millions of transistors.
Moore’s Law, initially formulated by Gordon Moore, then Chairman of Intel, first appeared in a 1965 article in the 35th anniversary edition of Electronics, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.” Moore’s Law asserts that the complexity of minimum-cost semiconductor components has doubled regularly each year since the first prototype microchip was introduced in 1959. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Moore’s Law began to be rephrased by others in terms of the number of transistors that fit on a chip of fixed size, or the computational power per unit cost. This remarkable law has held strong at least up to the writing of this article, in 2005. In addition, a number of Moore’s Law-type variants of exponential growth have appeared in the development of LED lights, resolution of brain scanning devices, mass use of inventions, number of genomes sequenced, availability of RAM, size of magnetic data storage, and fastest possible data transmission speed. What makes the success of Moore’s
Moore’s Law is a concept which was first proposed in 1965 by Gorden E. Moore, one of the founders of Intel, a major American technology company. Simply put, Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a microchip will increase exponentially, typically doubling every two years. Since microchips are the powerhouses of electronics industry, this exponential progression obviously has a huge impact on computer hardware. Moore’s observation was based on his experience in the integrated circuit manufacturing industry. He observed that Intel was able to double the number of transistors on an individual chip approximately every 18-24 months, and that this trend held steady through multiple generations of chips. By 1970, people were referring to this phenomenon as “Moore’s Law,” thanks to Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, who coined the phrase. A glance at a graph which tracks microchip production proves that Moore’s Law is a reality, although people ar
Moore’s Law is really just a prediction that the processing power of the state-of-the-art computer chip will double every 18 months. It’s named after computer engineer Gordon Moore, a co-founder of the Intel Corporation. In 1965, Moore observed that since the invention of integrated circuits (or microchips) in 1959, the number of transistors that a chip of constant surface area could hold had doubled once every year or two. (Integrated circuits are the basic units of computer logic and memory, and transistors are the “on-off” switches that allow digital information to be transmitted, processed, and stored. The more transistors you can pack on a circuit, the more powerful the circuit becomes.) Moore simply predicted that this pattern would continue.
