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Moore s law turns 50 - Ever more from Moore

A microchip pioneer s prediction has a bit more life left in it

Apr 18th 2015 | From the print edition

NEWS of the death of Moore s law has always been greatly exaggerated. People

started to pronounce it deceased not long after Gordon Moore, co-founder of

Intel, a chipmaker, published on April 19th 1965 a paper arguing that the

number of transistors that can be etched on a given surface area of silicon

would double every year. In a later paper he corrected his forecast to every

two years, which has come to be stated as his law . Regularly proving sceptics

wrong, however, the exponential growth kept going (see chart), driving the

digital revolution.

Yet signs are multiplying that half a century later, the law is running out of

steam. It is not so much that physical limits are getting in the way even

though producing transistors only 14 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide,

the current state of the art can be quite tricky. Intel says that it can keep

the law going for at least another ten years, eventually slimming its

transistors down to 5nm, about the thickness of a cell membrane. Other than

shrinking circuitry further, it has also started to stack components, in effect

building 3D chips.

If Moore s law has started to flag, it is mainly because of economics. As

originally stated by Mr Moore, it was not just about reducing the size of

transistors, but also lowering their price. And a few years ago, when

transistors 28nm wide were the state of the art, chipmakers found their design

and manufacturing costs beginning to rise sharply. New fabs (semiconductor

fabrication plants) now cost more than $6 billion. In other words: transistors

can be shrunk further, but they are now getting more expensive.

Makers of smartphones and other mobile devices will no doubt be keen for

chipmakers to keep on packing ever more computing and storage power onto tiny

slivers of silicon, and may even be prepared to accept their cost going up.

But compactness is less important for another fast-growing branch of the

information-technology business, cloud computing. In cloud-service providers

cavernous data centres, space is not at a premium, the way it is inside the

latest iPhone. What increasingly matters most to cloud providers is energy

efficiency: how much power their racks of servers consume, and how they can

keep them sufficiently cool to ensure that their chips do not fry. Fortunately,

one of the corollaries of Moore s law is that the energy efficiency of

transistors follows the same exponential law, doubling around every two years.

And like the law itself, it s not quite dead yet.

From the print edition: Business