Moore’s Law in 2022: Whats the status quo? – Power & Beyond

SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY Moore's Law in 2022: Whats the status quo?

28.02.2022Updated on 27.07.2022 From Luke James

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Moores law is dead! This is a line of thought championed by many prominent individuals in the fields of electrical and power engineering. But its quite a controversial one; just as many people believe Moores Law is still true today in 2022 as those who believe that its dead and no longer valid.

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The debate of whether Moores Law is dying (or already dead) has been going on for years. It has been discussed by pretty much everyone. But before we can give an aswer to that, let's first clarify the meaning of Moore's Law.

Moore's Law stems from the observation of Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Intel, made in 1965. At the time, he said that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit had doubled roughly every year and would continue to do so for the next 10 years. In 1975, he revised his observation to say that this would occur every two years indefinitely.

Moore's Law is the principle that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years, as a result of increases in the number of transistors a microchip can contain.

Moores observation became the driving force behind the semiconductor technology revolution that led to the proliferation of computers and other electronic devices.

Moores Law is based on empirical observations made by Gordon Moore. The yearly doubling of the number of transistors on a microchip was extrapolated from observed data in 1965.Over time, the details of Moores Law were amended to reflect the true growth of transistor density. First, the doubling interval was increased to two years and then decreased to around 18 months. The exponential nature of Moores Law continued and created decades of opportunity for the semiconductor industry and the electronics that use them.

The issue for Moores Law is the inherent complexity of semiconductor process technology, and these complexities have been growing. Transistors are now three-dimensional, and the small feature size of todays advanced process technologies has required multiple exposures to reproduce these features on silicon wafers. This has added extreme complexity to the design process and has slowed down Moores Law.

Watch this video to see the origin story of Moore's Law with statement by Gordon Moore:

This slowing down has led many to ask, Is Moores Law dead?The simple answer to this is no, Moores Law is not dead. While its true that chip densities are no longer doubling every two years (thus, Moores Law isnt happening anymore by its strictest definition), Moores Law is still delivering exponential improvements, albeit at a slower pace. The trend is very much still here.

Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger believes that Moore's Law is far from obsolete. As a goal for the next 10 years, he announced in 2021 not only to uphold Moore's Law, but to outpace it. There are many industry veterans who agree with this. Mario Morales, a program vice president at IDC, said he believes Moores Law is still relevant in theory in an interview with TechRepublic.If you look at what Moores Law has enabled, were seeing an explosion of more computing across the entire landscape,' he said. It used to be computing was centered around mainframes and then it became clients and now edge and endpoints, but theyre getting more intelligent, and now theyre doing AI inferencing, and you need computing to do that. So, Moores Law has been able to continue to really push computing to the outer edge.

While the consensus is that Moores Law is slowing down and that it might soon be augmented, it is still driving improvements in processing technology and the amount of progress that follows these improvements.

If it were dead, it simply couldnt do this.

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