— Ch. 1 · Origins And Observation —
Moore's law.
~6 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a brief article titled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits" in Electronics magazine. He was the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor when he made this prediction. The article speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 25,000 components on a single quarter-square-inch semiconductor. Moore noted that complexity for minimum component costs had increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. He projected this rate would continue for at least another decade. This observation became known as Moore's law, though it was not a law of physics but an empirical relationship. In 1974, Robert H. Dennard at IBM recognized rapid MOSFET scaling technology. His work described how power density stays constant as transistors get smaller. Evidence from the industry showed this inverse relationship broke down in the mid-2000s. At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, Moore revised his forecast. He predicted semiconductor complexity would double annually until about 1980, then decrease to doubling approximately every two years. Shortly after 1975, Caltech professor Carver Mead popularized the term Moore's law. Moore viewed his eponymous law as surprising and optimistic. He stated that "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better." The observation even became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Technical Evolution And Scaling
Numerous innovations sustained Moore's law since the beginning of the integrated circuit era. Complementary metal, oxide, semiconductor (CMOS) was invented by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1963. Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) developed by Robert H. Dennard at IBM in 1967 followed. Chemically amplified photoresist appeared circa 1980, invented by Hiroshi Ito, C. Grant Willson, and J. M. J. Fréchet at IBM. This material was 5 to 10 times more sensitive to ultraviolet light. Deep UV excimer laser photolithography emerged around 1980 through Kanti Jain at IBM. Interconnect innovations of the late 1990s included chemical-mechanical polishing and copper interconnects. These enabled improved wafer yield and additional layers of metal wires. Modern nanoscale transistors typically take the form of multi-gate MOSFETs. The FinFET has gate dielectric on three sides of the channel. In 2006, researchers from KAIST and the National Nano Fab Center developed a 3 nm transistor based on FinFET technology. A team at the University of New South Wales announced the first working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal in 2012. Moore's law predicted this milestone for ICs in the lab by 2020. In May 2021, IBM announced the creation of the first 2 nm computer chip with parts smaller than human DNA.