The End of Moore’s Law?

The End of Moore’s Law?

I fell in love with the wonderment of the transistor a long time ago, and it got me into technology. It was pure magic — a little current on an NPN transistor from the Base to the Emitter caused a much larger current to flow from the Collector to the Emitter. And, then FET transistors came along and where you didn’t need much current at all to switch the transistor from one state to another.

I then moved from an electronic department to a computing department, and I lost track of the development of the transistor — but its theory is still fresh in my head. Unfortunately, most of the rest of our society has forgotten about these magical devices.

So, as a society, when did we lose our wonderment in technology and take it so much for granted? The wavelength of light is between 400 and 700 nanometres, and the width of an atom is 0.1 nanometers. But we now make transistors that have a gate size of just 3 nanometers — that is just 30 atoms across. How is that even possible? And, so, we just take that processor in your phone for granted. But, could Moore’s Law be coming to an end, as we just can’t shrink our transistors any smaller?

As a thing that is manufactured, there are more transistors manufactured than all the other things put together.

The End of Moore’s Law?

When I started my career, I saw the future. It was a simple little plastic device with three legs. Inside was a piece of silicon that could be arranged as NPN or PNP. My first steps in higher education involved the study of these amazing — if not magical — little devices.

The transistor has a collector, a base, and an emitter. Current flow from the collector to the base, but where it could be controlled by the current flow from the base. We thus had a control of current, and the first applications were with amplifiers of current. A small change in the input current — such as from a microphone — could create a much large change in the output current. But the big change came when we used these as an ON or OFF device — and so our digital world was created. Unfortunately, on 25 March 2023, a giant of the building of the semiconductor industry passed away: Gordon Moore.

In the late 1950, it was Bill Shockley at Bell Labs who created the transistor, but he was rather difficult to work with, and so eight of the team — including Gordon Moore — left to found Fairchild Semiconductor. For several decades, Fairchild Semiconductor was one of the leaders in the semiconductor area.

It was Gordon, in 1964, who plotted the growth in the number of transistors that could be fitted onto a single microchip, and found that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto an integrated circuit approximately doubled every 18 months. This is now known as Moore’s law, and has been surprisingly accurate ever since — and basically says that computing power doubles every two years (Figure 1).

After founding Fairchild’s, in 1968, Gordon teamed up with Robert Noyce to co-create Intel (“Integrated Electronics”). One of the first hires for Intel was Andy Grove, and who led much of the technical innovation of Intel over the 1980s and 1990s.

As, so, while Intel created the first microprocessor (the 4004) and one of the first memory chips, their big break came when IBM selected the Intel 8086 for their IBM PC (Figure 2). It was a rather messy processor that contained both 8-bit and 16-bit registers but soon it became the standard architecture of the computer industry.

Before this, IBM had often used their components, but for the IBM PC, they selected the Intel processor. Ever since, Intel developed their 16-bit processors into a 32-bit processor with the 80386/486, and then onto 64-bit processors such as the Pentium processor. Along the way, Intel has had few major contenders but fell out of other markets (such as for memory chips).

In 2002, Moore received a Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honour in the US.