No More Moore's Law?

For decades, technologists have lived by the mantra of Moore’s Law. But cloud, faster technological advancement and economics are jeopardizing the principle's position.

Moore's Law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in a 1965 paper that later appeared in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965. Titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits," the article said:

The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself. The advantages of integration will bring about a proliferation of electronics, pushing this science into many new areas.

Moore predicted that the number of microcomponents that could be placed in an integrated circuit (or microchip) of the lowest manufacturing cost was doubling every year and that this trend would likely continue into the future. This observation became an industry roadmap adopted by all major chip manufacturers across all ASIC streams. Unlike the rules of natural law, Moore's Law does not merely happen independently; rather, an entire industry works to make it happen and any period that meets the expectations set out by the law is considered a fairly good period.

Exponential Growth Problem

The new age economic boom can partly be attributed to the technological advancement heralded by faster processing and decreasing price. But just as all good things must come to an end, the party for integrated circuits may already be over, said Robert Colwell, director of the Microsystems Technology Office at the government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Intel's chief chip architect from 1990 to 2001, and an Intel Fellow.

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