Short answers, pulled from the story.
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, with minimal increase in cost. It describes an empirical relationship, not a scientific law, and has been used by the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and set research and development targets.
Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and a former Chief Executive Officer of Intel. In 1965, while serving as director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, he wrote a brief article titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits" predicting that the number of components per integrated circuit would keep doubling each year. He revised the forecast to doubling every two years at the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting.
The 18-month figure comes from a separate prediction by Intel executive David House in 1975. House noted that Moore's transistor-doubling rate, combined with Dennard scaling, implied that overall chip performance would roughly double every 18 months. The transistor count doubling itself remained a two-year prediction.
Semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace Moore's law predicted. Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO, stated at the end of 2023 that effective doubling was occurring closer to every three years. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared Moore's law dead in September 2022, while Gelsinger at that time held the opposite view.
Moore's second law, also called Rock's law, is named after Arthur Rock and states that the capital cost of a semiconductor fabrication plant increases exponentially over time. It reflects the rising expense of manufacturing chips as they become more complex, with the cost of key manufacturing tools such as extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment doubling every four years.
Key enabling inventions include the silicon monolithic IC chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, the CMOS process by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass in 1963, chemically amplified photoresist invented at IBM around 1980, and deep UV excimer laser photolithography invented by Kanti Jain at IBM around the same period. In the early 2000s, Gurtej Singh Sandhu at Micron Technology invented processes that extended Moore's law to the 30 nm class and smaller.