Moore’s Law states that the complexity of low-cost semiconductor components doubles every year since 1959. It has been rephrased in terms of transistors and computing power. The law is expected to face a hitch in 2015 due to photolithography reaching its limits. Other alternatives, such as DNA computing and nanocomputing, will have to be used to ensure exponential growth. The cost of R&D for these alternatives will be high, but demand for computing power will likely create the necessary supply.
Moore’s Law, first formulated by Gordon Moore, then president of Intel, first appeared in a 1965 article in the 35th Anniversary Edition of Electronics, “Cramming Multiple Components on Integrated Circuits.” He says the complexity of low-cost semiconductor components has steadily doubled every year since the first prototype microchip was introduced in 1959.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Moore’s Law began to be rephrased by others in terms of the number of transistors that fit on a fixed size chip or computing power per unit cost. This remarkable law remained strong until at least this article was written in 2005. In addition, numerous variants of Moore’s exponential growth have appeared in the development of LED lights, the resolution of brain scanning devices, the mass use of inventions, number of genomes sequenced, availability of RAM, size of magnetic data storage, and fastest possible data rate.
What makes the success of Moore’s Law even more fascinating is that Moore only had 6 years of experience with microchips as the basis for his claim, yet still held on for another 40 years. The death of the law has been foretold many times, but it continues to move forward. Industry experts expect a hitch around 2015, when conventional photolithographic techniques will reach their final limits.
Photolithography uses beams of light to etch features into a chip, meaning that etching smaller features requires smaller wavelengths of light. Photolithography is already approaching the ultraviolet range. Going much further is difficult due to the large energies required to produce smaller frequency waves. Therefore, other alternatives, such as DNA computing, nanocomputing, 3D chips or something unprecedented, will have to be used to ensure the exponential growth of computing power.
The economy, in at least one area, has had to buckle to support Moore’s Law’s continued exponential growth. That area is the seed capital needed to build a modern microchip manufacturing facility, currently on the order of $1.5 – $2 billion (US dollars). The R&D costs of pushing photolithography beyond Moore’s Law will likely be in the same order of cost, if not several times greater. But as the demand for computing power used for a variety of applications increases, there is a high likelihood that the supply needed to meet that demand will be created.
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