Moore’s law

Moore’s Law. Law created by Intel co-founder Gordon Earl Moore , which foresaw in 1965 that the total number of transistors integrated in a circuit would be doubled every two years. Theory that has been maintained for more than 40 years and the prognosis has proven to be accurate.

Summary

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• 1 Creation of the Law
• 2 Electronics Magazine
• 3 Trends and their relationship with nanotechnology
  • 1 Opinion of some experts
  • 2 Considerations of some computer scientists
• 4 Sources

Creation of the Law

In the second half of the 19th century , Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors per inch in integrated circuits would double every 18 months and that this trend would continue for at least two decades.

The person whose name bears Moore’s Law is called Gordon. He was born in 1929 in the small town of Pescadero, in California. A career chemist, he did a doctorate in Physics and Chemistry, and it wasn’t until he started working that he found integrated circuits. He worked under the Nobel Prize for Physics William Shockley in his laboratories. Within a few years, eight workers including Moore left the company tired of their boss’s extravagances and founded a semiconductor company called Fairchild.

At the time of writing the article that originated his law, Moore was Director of Fairchild Labs . It was later, along with one of his colleagues at Shockley and Fairchild, named Robert Noyce, when he created Intel, in the summer of 1968 .

Electronics Magazine

In 1965. Electronics Magazine turned 35, and Moore was asked for an article predicting what electronics would be like in the near future, in about 10 years. Moore looked at integrated circuits, which were 4 years old at the time, and their evolution until then. He noted that the number of transistors and resistors was doubling each year. So that’s exactly what he predicted:

“The number of components of an integrated circuit will continue to double every year, and in 1975 they will be a thousand times more complex than in 1965”

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And the number of components more or less followed the path Moore had planned. Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004 ( 1971 ) had 2,250 transistors; in 2002 the Pentium 4 had more than 50 million.

Trends and their relationship with nanotechnology

The computer and technology industry has made this statement the standard on the readiness to be followed by innovations; therefore, in order to achieve this objective, it must be considered that it depends on the ability to create and place more and more transistors on a silicon fragment, so the latter have tended to become smaller and smaller.

However, Moore himself has recognized that his maxim cannot always continue, because the size of transistors today is very close to that of atoms , which establishes the main barrier in this race of extreme miniaturization of the components of the CPU.

But the only drawback is not the size of the transistors, but also the other devices that are required for the manufacture and operation of the processing units, such as the cables that transfer the data, which are currently being manufactured based on elongated molecules called nanotubes, to make the nanoscopic cables.

This law has made the rest of the electronic and digital devices also have an exponential growth of most of the basic parameters, such as the megapixels of digital cameras.

However, to make smaller and smaller computers that can process larger and larger amounts of data, they need to be inexpensive, and to do so the technology to be used is extremely expensive, at least for now.

Opinion of some experts

Some experts believe that the world in which daily activities are carried out would not be the same without the miniaturization achieved in transistors.

At the same time there are conflicting opinions regarding whether Moore’s law has a visible limit, as computer scientists believe that the next developments in molecular electronics or quantum computers are yet to come, but just around the corner is the new generation of transistors that integrate optoelectronic chips, which will be predictably faster than the current ones, while others maintain that the problem with this law is that very probably every two years we will have to change the computer, if we want it to be faster in the data processing, which ensures high incomes for computer companies.

Considerations of some computer scientists

On the other hand, some computer scientists consider that the limit of this law is not determined by the ability to integrate transistors, but rather by the ability to cool said microprocessor, arguing that heat reduction should be attacked not at the macroscopic level but at its root, in the matter that makes up the microprocessor, silicon, or using liquid Nitrogen for its cooling, working with optoelectronic and photonic functionalities.

Although all these limitations may arise in the future, within companies, the ‘Moore’s Law’ has meant that articles that use microchips reduce their prices while improving their characteristics, making computers increasingly powerful, and therefore not more expensive.