Moore's law is the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The law is named after Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.[1][2][3] His prediction has proven to be accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.[4] The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,[5]memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[6] All of these are improving at roughly exponential rates as well. This exponential improvement has dramatically enhanced the impact of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[7] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity and economic growth in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.[8][9][10][11]

The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and their being faster).[12]

Although this trend has continued for more than half a century, Moore's law should be considered an observation or conjecture and not a physical or natural law. Sources in 2005 expected it to continue until at least 2015 or 2020.[note 1][14] However, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth will slow at the end of 2013,[15] when transistor counts and densities are to double only every three years.

For the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics Magazine which was published on April 19, 1965; Gordon E. Moore, whom was currently working as the Director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked to predict what was going to happen in the semiconductor components industry over the next 10 years. His response was a brief 4 page article entitled, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". Within is editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65,000 components on a single quarter-inch semiconductor. His reasoning was a log-linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time:[16]

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will remain nearly constant for at least 10 years."

-Moore, 1965

In 1975 when Moore saw that his predictions a decade earlier had proven true with the development of a 16k charge-coupled-device (CCD) memory chip which housed nearly 65,000 components, Moore decided to re-evaluate his hypothesis regarding the annual rate of density-doubling. During the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting he outlined his analysis of the contributing factors to this exponential behavior:[16]

Finally, Moore, reported a re-evaluation of his hypothesis, stating that it was more reasonable to assume that circuit density-doubling would occur every eighteen months.[16]

Shortly after the 1975 IEEEE Meeting, a professor at Caltech by the name of Carver Mead, whom was a pioneer in VLSI as well as an entrepreneur coined the term "Moore's law"[2][17] Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed years prior. Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture.[18] A New York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the prediction in 1959.[19]

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and then concluded:

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