Tuesday, April 7, 2015

“Moore’s Law is more popular than Murphy’s Law” – BBC

Half a century ago, an American engineer Gordon Moore predicted annual doubling of processor performance – Moore’s Law. “Times” to understand, how to begin microchips and endlessly whether they can “disperse».

«How to place more components integrated circuit” – with no attractive title in April 1965 Year in trade magazine published an article Electronics young engineer Gordon Moore, co-founder of the future by Intel. Empirical observation that made the engineer in four-page article, for many years has identified the development of computer technology, predicted the emergence of home computers, mobile phones.

It read:

number of electronic components, primarily transistors placed per unit area of ​​the silicon crystal in the manufacture of integrated circuits doubles approximately every year.

In the early 1960s, Moore was the Director of Development for Fairchild Semiconductor, which he and his colleagues organized in 1957 for the production of electronic components. Fairchild was one of the few firms that engage in the production of transistors – the basic semiconductor devices, which are now commonly used in billions of microchips for computing and data storage. While most electronic circuits consisted of individual transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes mounted on one circuit board. However, in 1959 from Fairchild Gene Gurney invented the planar transistor – transistor formed on a silicon substrate. With several of these transistors on a single chip of silicon and connecting them together, engineers were able to significantly reduce the size of chips and increase their productivity.

In 1961, Fairchild created a chip with four transistors, in 1965 – just 64 components.

In his article that the same year, Moore wrote: “The future of integrated electronics – the future of electronics in general.” This seemingly obvious statement in those years seemed quite controversial. Many believed that the integrated circuits only take their own niche, and Moore trend seen exponential growth performance chips just a coincidence.

Moore predicted that by 1975 will be made microchip with 65K. Electronic components. He was wrong by a factor of two: this year, Intel, the company, which became the creator of Moore, left Fairchild in 1968, released a CCD with 32 thousand. Components. In the same year, at a conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Moore modified its law, predicting a doubling of density components not one, but two years.

Over the past half century, the cost per transistor has fallen from $ 30 to nanodollarov and relevance of Moore’s Law has created a new faster computers through which planes fly, was created by the Internet and open the Higgs boson .

In our time, the world production of microarrays has become an industry which operates, in fact, the astronomical parameters. In 2014, the world produced 250 billion billion (250 x 10 18 ) transistors, that is, every second was made on 8 trillion of these semiconductor elements.

This is 25 times greater than the number of stars in our galaxy, and 75 times greater than the number of known galaxies in the universe.

The growth rate of the density of transistors on a chip, too dazzling. In 2014 alone produced more transistors than at any time before 2011.

Half a century later, Gordon Moore engaged in charity, supporting environmental protection and scientific research through his foundation Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Here on the eve of the anniversary of his article, he said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum:

»… Integral scheme then existed only a few years. Shook first market with up to 30 components on the chip. I remembered where to start technology, which I think is fundamental – the production of a planar transistor: I noticed that the number of components is doubling every year. And I just did a rough extrapolation, saying that the density will double every year the next ten years. Now the term resist. Some time ago I zaguglit and found that Moore’s Law is more popular than Murphy’s Law.

… I have never predicted that Moore’s Law will stop working. I said that I can not foresee more than two generations of microchips, and I always thought that we are approaching some kind of wall. But this wall all the time moving away. I remember how Stephen Hawking answered a question that may limit the development of integrated circuits. Now it is not his field, but he came to the conclusion that it is finite speed of light and the atomic structure of materials. And I think he was right. Now we are very close to the atomic nature of the materials. We used every opportunity to speed, but the speed of light limit perfection chips. I do not know how to overcome these fundamental limitations. ”

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