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MOORE’S Law, the theory that has held more-or-less true for the semiconductor industry since it was first formulated, has turned 50.
In April 1965, an electronic magazine asked Gordon E Moore, director of the R&D department at Fairchild Semiconductor, to describe the future of the transistor industry. Moore famously predicted that the industry would double the number of transistors on chips every year.
Moore would later become founder of Intel, and in 1975, amended his prediction to double chip capacity every two years.
In some ways, Moore’s Law, which had started as a theorem extrapolated from a limited data set, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving the semiconductor industry to continue miniaturising chips and making them stronger and faster, so as not to fall behind. Today, chips have billions of transistors, with their small size and power enabling many of the technologies common to consumers today.
But at the same time, Moore’s Law may be having an increasingly detrimental effect for semiconductor start-ups, by raising the barrier to entry for new players. Today, according to International Business Strategies, it costs US$132 million to design a chip using 14nm architecture, due to the complexity, time and expense required to design chips with billions of transistors.
Big, established companies, of course, can continue to invest in new, higher density chip designs, but many start-ups, who bring the majority of the innovation to the industry, will fail to get the level of funding they need to overcome the obstacle now embodied by Moore’s Law.