Moore's Law essay turns 45

Gordon Moore established his Law 45 years ago

The paper famous for establishing the concept of Moore's Law marked its 45th anniversary on Monday.

Fairchild Semiconductor research director Gordon Moore published an article in the 19 April 1965 edition of Electronics magazine entitled Cramming more components onto integrated circuits (PDF).

Moore wrote about the rapidly evolving pace of the semiconductor business and the speed at which faster components were being developed. Most important was his predictions about the density of new chips.

Moore suggested that advances in the market would combine with falling costs to create a phenomenon in which the number of transistors on a chip would double annually.

"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year," he said. "Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."

As the predictions in the paper came to fruition, the essay gained notoriety and its central premise became known as Moore's Law.

In the years since, the premise has pushed the development of faster processors, particularly at Intel, which Moore founded three years after the paper was published.

In a 1995 retrospective on the article, entitled Lithography and the Future
of Moore's Law (PDF), Moore said that the paper was not only a prediction about the future of the industry, but a motion on behalf of the recently developed integrated circuit.

"There was still a large contingent in the user community who wanted to design their own circuits, and who considered the job of the semiconductor industry to be to supply them with transistors and diodes so they could get on with their jobs," Moore wrote.

"I was trying to emphasise the fact that integrated circuits really did have an important role to play."