19 Apr 2010
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."
Latest stories from Components
Related articles
Related jobs
Poll
What is the most important IT priority for your company this year?
Hands on with the highly anticipated Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich hybrid tablet
Connect with V3.co.uk
This paper focuses on a series of best practices and techniques for development teams looking to improve their software development processes
Why good data management at all levels is essential in the modern business (video, 6mins)
Project Manager, London - Software Solutions (Project...
Project Manager - Hampshire - up to £32K - Fixed Term...
Senior Customer Support Consultant - 2nd/3rd Line Support...
C++/C#/Java developer for a global investment bank within...
Keep up to date with the latest products, services and technologies from the world's leading IT companies. IThound.com brings you over 2,000 white papers, case studies and analyst reports.
Do you agree?