Moore's law
The rule of thumb that the number of components on a chip keeps doubling at regular intervals. Not a law of physics but a pace the semiconductor industry set itself.
In a 1965 magazine article Gordon Moore, then at Fairchild, showed that the number of components on a chip had been roughly doubling every year and suggested the trend would continue for some time[1]. In 1975 he revised it to a doubling every two years.
It is not a law of nature. It held for half a century because the whole industry planned its schedules and investment around it. Since the mid-2000s, shrinking transistors alone has no longer delivered better performance, and component counts have been raised by other means such as three-dimensional structures and stacking. Whether Moore's law is over depends on what you choose to count.
Related terms
- Integrated circuitA circuit in which transistors and other components, together with the wiring between them, are all built into a single piece of semiconductor — a chip.
- Dennard scalingThe design rule that shrinking a transistor's dimensions and voltage by the same factor makes it faster and more efficient while keeping heat per unit area constant.
- Process nodeThe name given to a generation of chip-making technology. It is expressed as a length, such as 2 nanometers, but no longer corresponds to any actual dimension.