HARDWARE

Moore's law initially formulated by Gordon Moore, then Chairman of Intel, first appeared in a 1965 article in the 35th anniversary edition of Electronics, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits." Moore's Law asserts that the complexity of minimum-cost semiconductor components has doubled regularly each year since the first prototype microchip was introduced in 1959.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, Moore's Law began to be rephrased by others in terms of the number of transistors that fit on a chip of fixed size, or the computational power per unit cost. This remarkable law has held strong at least up to the writing of this article, in 2005. In addition, a number of Moore's Law-type variants of exponential growth have appeared in the development of LED lights, resolution of brain scanning devices, mass use of inventions, number of genomes sequenced, availability of RAM, size of magnetic data storage, and fastest possible data transmission speed.

What makes the success of Moore's Law all the more fascinating is that Moore only had 6 years experience with microchips as a basis for his assertion, but nonetheless it has held for 40 additional years. The death of Moore's Law has been predicted multiple times, but it has kept chugging on. Industry experts expect a hiccup in Moore's Law around 2015, when conventional photolithographical techniques will reach their final limits.