What is Moor's law in regard to computers?

Question

i meant Moore's law sorry

Answer 1

It roughly states that every two years, the available processing speed and memory for the latest computer technology will double.

"The observation was first made by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper.[2][3][4] The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.[5]"

Answer 2

MOORE'S LAW

Moore's Law, the guiding principle that has driven the computer chip industry, celebrates its 40th birthday this week.  The "law" was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in a 1965 article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months.  Chips that can work faster and faster have driven the technological and digital revolution so far.  Dr Moore said that the next 40 years could be "mind-boggling" and that he wished he could be around to see it.

"I re-read my 1965 article a year or so ago, and I frankly was surprised to see in it that I had predicted home computers as one of these uses for low-cost electronics, but had no idea what it would look like," he told the BBC News website.  He had forgotten about it until a young engineer came to him with the idea to build a home computer, while he was chief at Intel.



Dr Gordon Moore said, "I frankly didn't expect it to be at all precise. But in fact it turned out to be much more precise than it had any good reason for being, and a colleagues dubbed it 'Moore's Law.'  "I said 'gee that's fine but what would you use it for?'.  "The only application he could think of for it was the housewife putting her recipes on it, and I didn't think that was going to be a powerful enough application."

Calling from Hawaii to speak to journalists, the retired pioneer said the chips that drove electronics now were so much more capable because competition between chip makers had pushed progress.  But, he added, interfaces and software on computers and gadgets had to get easier to use as the capability of technologies continued to grow.  The law was never one of physics, but rather a prediction about how complex integrated circuits would become, which appeared in Electronics magazine on 19 April 1965.  The original copy of the magazine, which is now defunct, cannot be found. Intel has reportedly offered a $10,000 (£5,300) reward on eBay for a copy in mint condition.

Power chips

Dr Moore's proposition was that systems were going to get much more complicated than they were, and that integrated circuits would be the way to keep costs of electronics down.  "Integrated circuit" is the term used to describe the collection of interconnected transistors, diodes and circuits on a piece of semiconducting material - a silicon chip.

Circuit board

When Dr Moore wrote his article, integrated circuits had 30 components - the elements that make them work - in them. The labs he worked in at the time had one with 60 components.  "I looked back at the few preceding years and saw that we had about doubled every year.  I took this doubling every year and extrapolated it for 10 years to say the complexity of integrated circuits would go from 60 to something like 60,000 on a chip."  He said it had been a "pretty wild" extrapolation, but one that he hoped would be accurate and that would push prices down.  "I frankly didn't expect it to be at all precise. But in fact it turned out to be much more precise than it had any good reason for being, and one of my colleagues dubbed it 'Moore's Law'."

Digital resolution

Without chips which continually improve their performance and shrink in size, mobiles, PDAs (personal digital assistants), game consoles, laptops, and digital music players, that are such a part of many people's lives, would not be as sophisticated.

Wafer of silicon

Scientists are finding ways to create chips of the future using other materials

But there are limits to how much can be fitted on to chips effectively, and Dr Moore predicts that his law has about 10 to 20 years before a fundamental limit is reached.

There are also problems with pushing to increase performance while at the same time trying to limit problems of power leakage and reducing heat levels that rise as more circuits are crammed into an ever smaller space.  Researchers all over the world are looking to quantum computing and nanotechnologies to find alternatives for silicon-based chip technologies.   But Dr Moore said he was sceptical about efforts to replace components with technologies and materials developed at the nano-scale.

"Nanotechnology is a very broad field with a lot of applications but I am sceptical that it will replace the more standard silicon technology in the mainstream," he said.  "We are already operating at well below 100nm which is the conventional boundary for nanotechnology. But the general idea of building things up atom by atom from the bottom comes from a different direction."  He added: "There is a huge difference between making one tiny transistor and connecting a billion of them to do something useful."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/44...

THE IMPACT OF MOORE'S LAW

"Moore's Law reflects the extraordinary improvements in silicon technology in last 40 years.

"There are no words to describe its impact. It is immense. Most people don't have the faintest idea what it is has done," he told the BBC News website.

What Dr Moore wrote about in the 1960s quickly became a benchmark for competing electronics industries, as well as the scientists and engineers working in the field of semiconductors.

"If all of these thousands of scientists had not contributed, then Moore's Law would have seen an increase of 9% every five years, or something like that, and we would still be in the Dark Ages electronically speaking," thinks Professor Mackintosh.  Even Dr Moore is surprised about the longevity of the observation, but he admits the "law" has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

"Amazingly enough, we have been staying on or a little ahead of that trend for the last 40 years," Dr Moore said in a telephone conference last week.  "It has gotten to the point where participants in the semiconducting industry recognise they have to move along at least at that rate or fall behind technologically.  If you are a generation behind in technology, you suffer not only in performance disadvantage to your competitors, but also in cost disadvantage," Dr Moore said.    To fall behind would be a disaster in a business where making ever more complex circuits at smaller and smaller dimensions improves performance and lowers cost.  A transistor is a basic electronic switch in the chip. It was invented at Bell Labs in 1947. Every chip needs a certain number of transistors, and the more there are, the more chips can do.

"Practically anything digital has depended critically on the swift improvement in chip density," explains Professor Mackintosh.  "We wouldn't have mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras, some of the advances in medical technology, electronic games, satellites, GPS, and on and on."

END IN SIGHT?

But Moore's Law will not be an effective benchmark for the next 40 years. It is reaching technological limits in terms of how dense silicon chips can be - in other words, how many transistors can fit on to chips. "The industry now believes that we are approaching the limits of what classical technology - classical being as refined over the last 40 years - what that technology can do. Feature size is becoming so small we are now getting into the realm of quantum mechanics - atoms thick."  Intel, for instance, will start using 65-nanometre (billionths of a metre) manufacturing processes later this year. Rivals AMD are also moving in the same direction.  At that level, there are some challenges, and problems of unwanted current leakage start to occur.  "When it gets down to 10 atoms, it is a different realm of physics altogether and funny things start to happen," explains Professor Mackintosh.

Researchers in nano and microelectronics across the world are putting in a great deal of effort to develop some sort of substitute or innovation that will get over this problem.  Some are experimenting with nanostructured novel materials, such as carbon nanotubes, to replace transistors and diodes, and quantum mechanics.  Intel is also pioneering the use of lasers to improve the accuracy of circuit lithography.  Many of the possibilities are still a long way off, however, not least because complete circuits using these methods on a large scale are difficult and expensive to produce.

Some of the innovations on the nano-scale are improving on the existing technology, but in several other ways.

"There are other technology enablers that you need as you continue to scale Moore's Law," explains Josh Walden, Intel's Northern Ireland fabrication plant manager.  "We continue to come up with new materials to have lower interlayer electrical properties and we continue to innovate to reduce power and shrink transistor size to enable Moore's Law."  

But when Moore's Law is effectively slowed down in about 10 to 20 years' time, Professor Mackintosh thinks technology lovers will not necessarily notice much.   "As that progress slows down, computer manufacturers will put effort into the peripherals, such as better LCD [liquid crystal] displays, better batteries and so on.  "Otherwise, innovation will come to a grinding halt and we won't be buying them anymore."

Not something the electronics industry or gadget fans ever wish to see.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/natur...