Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore’s law [semiconductor scaling], the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every two years or so — which has generally meant that the chip’s performance will, too.
The semiconductor industry has released a research road map every two years to coordinate what its hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers are doing to stay in step with the law — a strategy sometimes called More Moore. It has been largely thanks to this road map that computers have followed the law’s exponential demands.
