"Moore's Law" essay turns 45

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Influential engineering paper marks anniversary

The paper famous for establishing the concept of "Moore's Law" marked its 45th anniversary Monday.

In the 19 April 1965 edition of Electronics Magazine, Fairchild Semiconductor research director Gordon Moore published an article titled "cramming more components onto integrated circuits. (PDF)"

Within the article, Moore reflected on the rapidly evolving pace of the semiconductor business and the speed with which faster components were being developed. Most important was Moore's prediction on the density of new chips.

Moore suggested that advancements in the market would combine with falling costs to create a phenomenon in which the number of transistors on a chip will double annually.

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year," Moore wrote in the original article.

"Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."

As the predictions in the paper came to fruition, the essay gained notoriety and its central premise became known as "Moore's Law." In the years since, the premise has pushed development of faster processors, particularly at Intel, which Moore founded 3 years after the paper was published.

In a 1995 retrospective on the article (PDF), Moore said that the paper was not only a prediction about the future of the industry, but also a motion on behalf of the recently-developed integrated circuit.

"There was still a large contingent in the user community who wanted to design their own circuits and who considered the job of the semiconductor industry to be to supply them with transistors and diodes so they could get on with their jobs," Moore wrote.

"I was trying to emphasize the fact that integrated circuits really did have an important role to play."

View: Original Article