What is Moore's Law?

[Daniel Nenni]

The following paper was published here a couple years ago by Daniel Nenni after I posted it on Linkedin. I cannot find the SemiWiki link, so I'm sharing the link to Linkedin.

In short, Moore's Law is an economic prediction based on a forecast of advances in fabrication technology. The problems that arose are fixed costs have increased substantially, variable costs have increased, and defect density has led to lower yields of large die sizes running on advanced fabrication processes. These increases have not offset higher transistor density. You can find my complete evaluation at the following link:

Moore's Law is Dead - Long Live the Chiplet! | Paul McWilliams | 10 comments

What I thought would take a day or maybe two to write and end up around 1,500 words ended up taking 29 days and expanded to a little over 5,000 words. While the research grew tedious at times, as I began to see the finish line in the distance, I enjoyed the ride and simply let the data take me...

www.linkedin.com

Moore’s Law is Dead – Long-live the Chiplet! - Semiwiki

Dr. Gordon Moore was the Director of Research and Development at Fairchild when he wrote the paper,

semiwiki.com

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[pmcw]

As I remember it Moore's Law was an observation not a law per say. Now it is a marketing term.

As it was related to me by friends who have firsthand knowledge, Carver Meed termed the predictions made by Gordon Moore in his seminal paper as "Moore's Law." The term, "Moore's Law" is more often misused than referenced appropriately, but marketers are known for creating their own reality...

Moore's Law is an economic forecast based on predicted advancements in fabrication technology. While today's leading edge fabrication technology provides many benefits in speed, power consumption and package size, the total cost per yielded transistor in an IC is higher than more mature nodes. That is what I covered in the paper published here a couple years ago.

Interestingly, the Chiplet, which I noted in my paper would be the rising tide, was presented in Dr. Moore's original 1965 article in Electronics as what might come next: Dr Moore didn't call it a Chiplet, but clearly described what we have since termed as a Chiplet in the following paragraphs:

"Day of reckoning
Clearly, we will be able to build such component-crammed equipment. Next, we ask under what circumstances we should do it. The total cost of making a particular system function must be minimized. To do so, we could amortize the engineering over several identical items or evolve flexible techniques for the engineering of large functions so that no disproportionate expense need be borne by a particular array. Perhaps newly devised design automation procedures could translate from logic diagram to technological realization without any special engineering.

It may prove to be more economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected. The availability of large functions, combined with functional design and construction, should allow the manufacturer of large systems to design and construct a considerable variety of equipment both rapidly and economically."