Moore’s Law
Moore’s law is an observation which states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit (IC) doubles every two years. This law was put forward by Gordon Moore. This law holds true because of the mass generation of MOSFET transistors which use less energy and has high scalability.
This law is applied to IC chips, which contain millions of transistors. Before the development of modern chips, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chips were used. But, as the technology in transistors developed, more and more transistors were fitted on a chip. This was all possible due to the reduced size of transistors. Now, the transistors of the scale of a few atoms. This has allowed for heavy integration in IC chips. The doubling period is often misquoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Moore’s colleague, Intel executive David House. In 1975, House noted that Moore’s revised law of doubling transistor count every 2 years in turn implied that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months (with no increase in power consumption). Moore’s law is closely related to MOSFET scaling, as the rapid scaling and miniaturization of MOSFETs is the key driving force behind Moore’s law. Mathematically, Moore’s Law predicted that transistor count would double every 2 years due to shrinking transistor dimensions and other improvements. As a consequence of shrinking dimensions, Dennard scaling predicted that power consumption per unit area would remain constant. Combining these effects, David House deduced that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months. Also due to Dennard scaling, this increased performance would not be accompanied by increased power i.e. the energy-efficiency of silicon-based computer chips roughly doubles every 18 months. Dennard scaling ended in the 2000s. Koomey later showed that a similar rate of efficiency improvement predated silicon chips and Moore’s Law, for technologies such as vacuum tubes.
Now-a-days, IC chips are usually used in Computer processors, Graphics cards where there is need of extensive calculations. Now, the density of transistors on a chip has increased so much that it seems as if we are on the point above which the Moore’s law will be violated. But, if the fabrication methods are advanced, we might see new transistors with a lot smaller size, nearly the scale of an atom.
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