Happy 40th birthday, Moore’s Law

updated 5:38 p.m. ET April 17, 2005

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - To mark its 35th year, Electronics magazine broke from its usual coverage of vacuum tubes, newfangled lasers and high-tech minutia to ask a handful of experts to look ahead and write about their vision of the future.

Among the contributors was the young research director of a company that made integrated circuits — a relatively recent advance that combined transistors on a chip and seemed a promising but expensive way to make electronics smaller.

“The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself,” he wrote. “The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of electronics, pushing this science into many new areas. Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers ...”

The year was 1965, the author Gordon Moore.

In three years, Moore would leave his job at Fairchild Semiconductor to co-found Intel Corp. His article — “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits,” buried on page 114 of the now-defunct magazine’s April 19 issue — set the pace for the chip industry, which has become a significant driver of the global economy.

‘It’s what made Silicon Valley’
Over time, the observation would be called “Moore’s Law.” It has set a guidepost for technologists around the world for four decades — and counting.

“It’s the human spirit. It’s what made Silicon Valley,” said Carver Mead, a retired California Institute of Technology computer scientist who coined the term “Moore’s Law” in the early 1970s. “It’s the real thing.”

Plotting curves on graph paper, Moore saw that the number of components on an integrated circuit had doubled every year and figured that rate would continue for a decade as transistors were made smaller. He saw that the per-component costs would fall as manufacturing improved.

“The accuracy of the plot was not my principal objective,” Moore said in a recent interview at Intel’s headquarters, where the former chairman and CEO still keeps a cubicle. “I just wanted to get the idea across that integrated circuits were the route to much lower-cost electronics.”

A powerful forecast
Time proved the prediction to be accurate — so much so that the chip industry’s future plans are based on Moore’s forecast, which he has since revised to a doubling every two years. A corollary has been a commensurate improvement in performance.

In 1954, a transistor cost $5.52. By 2004, its price tag was a billionth of a dollar.

The observation is even more impressive given that in 1965, there were just 50 to 60 transistors, among other components, on an integrated circuit, but the growth rate has closely followed his predicted curve to the present day.

At the same time, the cost per transistor has fallen as Moore predicted. In 1954, a transistor cost, on average, $5.52. By 2004, its price tag was a billionth of a dollar.

The implications have been huge, not just for computing but for everything touched by computers. All is now faster, better and cheaper — from desktop PCs that have the processing capabilities that once required a room-sized computer to feature-packed cell phones and portable music players the size of a pack of gum.

Not to mention all the silicon on factory floors, in automobiles and advanced weapons.

“The accomplishment which Moore’s Law represents has been the greatest technological success of human history,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s research lab. “There isn’t anything else out there that’s ever been such a spectacular improvement in technology.”

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