A Law that revolutionized the electronic industry: Moore's Law

In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel made a prediction that set the pace of modern digital revolution in a way nobody else could have imagined. He predicted big things to come in the decades ahead. His vision often stated as "Moore's Law" projected that a number of circuit components packed on an integrated circuit would double year after year. Decreasing component size by downscaling the feature size of transistors has been the key rule driving Moore's Law. And since then there has been no looking back for the ever growing and ever blooming electronic industry.

In 1965, Gordon Moore sketched out his prediction of the pace of silicon technology. Decades later, Moore's Law remains true, driven largely by Intel's unparalleled silicon expertise.
(Source-Moore's Law: Raising the bar (Intel Cooporation-2005))

In 1975, Moore in IEEE International Electronic Device Meeting revisited his law and stated that the number of circuit components packed on an integrated circuit would double every two years and argued that the three major contributing factors to this trend were- a) decreasing component size, b) increasing chip area, and c) "device cleverness," which referred to the engineers ability to minimize the unutilized area between transistors. Moore laid down the aisle for Intel to make speed, area, power and cost efficient transistors that would drive the modern day tools.

Since then, Intel has come a long way from the innovation of a single transistor in 1960s to 3072-Core GPU having 8,000,000,000 transistors integrated over a single chip in 2010s. In real sense, the golden rule of the electronic industry- Moore's Law set the springboard for innovation.

A timeline of semiconductors in computers
(Source- http://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/)

Few research communities over the years have strongly claimed that Moore's Law has become stagnant and dead in recent times from 2012 onwards as further scaling down the feature size of devices is not possible due to the dominating secondary order effects coming into existence causing the behaviour of devices to change completely. Though, Intel too in 2015 confirmed that the pace of Moore's law has slowed down, but as per International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, device size scaled down to 10nm is expected around 2019 and Intel shall leave no stone unturned to achieve this milestone and keep the law alive.

By-Dhriti Duggal,Assistant Professor (ECE),Chitkara University-Himachal Pradesh