NoSlak

Quote: Faster and faster, smaller and smaller -- it's the law

Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry's revered mantra and a key driver behind the explosion of the high-tech industry, is turning 40 on Tuesday.

It all started in the spring of 1965 when concepts such as personal computers in the home, cell phones, portable music players that can hold thousands of songs and automobiles with GPS navigation systems were still just science fiction.

That's when Gordon Moore, then director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, wrote in Electronics magazine that, based on his observation of the previous few years, chipmakers should be able to double the number of transistors on a microchip annually for at least the next decade. In 1975 he revised his estimate to doubling every two years.

Since that four-page article was published on April 19, 1965, the semiconductor industry has been on a torrid pace to keep up with what's been known as Moore's Law.

As a result, chipmakers have been figuring out ways to make transistors ever smaller to cram more of them onto a single piece of silicon.

Many of today's computer chips contain hundreds of millions of transistors, and Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker -- which Moore co-founded -- is expected to introduce a microprocessor with 1.7 billion transistors this year.

The net effect of squeezing more components onto microchips has been far reaching. Today's home PCs have more processing power than the mainframe computers used in 1969 to put men on the moon.

Portable digital entertainment devices such as the iPod and the recently released PlayStation Portable can put thousands of songs or display realistic graphics in the palm of a consumer's hand.

But the impact of Moore's Law has been more than being able to create whiz-bang electronics gadgets. Perhaps the biggest ramification has been that chipmakers are making more-powerful chips at less cost.

By producing huge volumes of products and making electronic gadgets more affordable for the masses, the chip industry has become a $200 billion-plus enterprise.

"I wanted to get across the idea that integrated circuits could be made cheap," Moore, 76, said in a recent meeting with reporters.

Dan Hutcheson, CEO of industry research firm VLSI Research Inc. in San Jose, puts it this way: In 1954 -- five years before integrated circuits were invented -- the price of a single transistor was about $5.50. As of last year, that price had plummeted to about one-billionth of a dollar, he said.

Moreover, having a guidepost on how fast the chips would be evolving meant other industries could also figure out how to time their developments, Hutcheson said.

"What it really did was that it provided the vision that everybody can build their business around," he said. "For example, if this was going to grow at a constant rate, that meant that the software guys can build their products around that."

Among chipmakers, Moore's Law has been the measuring stick for competition, where they either keep up or give up trying.

Moore said all he was doing initially was simply extrapolating numbers of transistors based on history, "not thinking that it was going to be especially accurate. But it turned out that it became incredibly accurate."

However, there was a stretch through the 1980s and much of the 1990s when the industry seemed to be falling behind that schedule.

But since chipmakers caught up in the megahertz race in the late 1990s, the industry has been back on track.

"The really important thing about Moore's Law has been just the fact that it's been out there as a challenge for the industry," said Fred Weber, chief technical officer at Sunnyvale chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices.

But just as in the past, the cloud of uncertainty is gathering on whether the continued shrinking of transistors can go on.

One of the side effects of jamming more transistors and revving them up to make them go faster has been increased consumption of electricity and the fact that chips are getting too hot.

Firms like Santa Clara's Intel and AMD are beginning to build dual-core processors, which are like two chips in one, to reduce heat while continuing to improve performance.

Chipmakers believe they have enough promising technologies in their labs to keep Moore's Law alive for at least another decade or so.

At the same time, the industry is looking for more exotic solutions to making chips, such as using carbon nanotubes or such technologies as spintronics, which is a way of storing and processing information by spinning electrons.

Moore admits he's had his share of skepticism about whether the industry can keep up the pace.

"These barriers seemed very reasonable at the time ... but we blew through those limits," he said. However, he said he believes there's still some headroom.

"I think we've got quite a bit more to go ... but then I can never see more than 10 years," Moore said.
Following the law

While there were years when chipmakers fell behind the schedule of Moore's Law, the industry is back on track. Here are some key moments.

-- 1985: Intel 386 processor with 275,000 transistors

-- 1989: Intel 486 processor with 1.2 million transistors

-- 1993: Intel Pentium processor with 3.1 million transistors

-- 2001: Pentium 4 processor with 42 million transistors

-- 2002: Intel Itanium 2 processor with 220 million transistors

-- 2005: Intel is expected to release its latest Itanium 2 processor with 1.7 billion transistors
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nev_payne

Wonder if Intel found that Electronics Publishing from 1965 in the end?

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