What Is Moore's Law?
Last month, in Science magazine, a scientist wrote that the computer
industry is "in serious danger" of violating Moore's Law. What is he referring
to?
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.
Even though it's not really a law, Moore's prediction has held true for the
past three decades. In fact, its hallowed status has made it self-fulfilling:
Chipmakers and industry analysts now set their goals and forecasts based on
Moore's Law. And because chip prices have decreased even as capacity has risen,
the computer processing power available to consumers at a given price has
doubled even more quickly.
Since Moore's Law depends on the continuous shrinking of transistors,
scientists generally agree that it will eventually be violated. Previous
predictions that it would break down have proved incorrect, and most scientists
expect Moore's Law to hold for at least 10-15 more years. But the
Science article suggests that Moore's Law may encounter physical limits
sooner. Transistors have already shrunk to one five-hundredth the width of a
human hair. To adhere to Moore's Law, within five years engineers would have to
create transistors that are only a few dozen atoms across--a feat that might be
impossible, since atomic movement is so difficult to predict. (Click here to read the New York Times '
non-technical piece on the Science article.) Engineers are currently
investigating new materials and technologies that might allow Moore's Law to
survive this latest challenge.
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