Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Moore's Law

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

In 1965, the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, Gordon Moore, made a prediction about the future of semiconductors. He said that over the next ten years, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years. His prediction didn’t just hold true for the next 10 years, but it has held true for almost 60 years, and it had driven the global computer industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1965, the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, Gordon Moore, made a prediction about the future of semiconductors. He said that over the next 10 years, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years. His prediction didn't just hold true for the next 10 years, but has held true for almost 60 years, and it has driven the global computer industry. Learn more about Moore's Law and why computers keep on getting better on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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For those of you that aren't familiar with it, let me restate what it is. Moore's Law stipulates that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. Despite the name, Moore's Law isn't a physical law of nature like the Law of Thermodynamics. Moore's Law is more of an observation and a prediction than a hard and fast rule. In fact, as we'll see in a bit, eventually Moore's Law will have to end at some point because, as you keep doubling things, the numbers eventually start colliding into the laws of physics. Before we get into that, however, we need to know where Moore's Law came from, and for that, we need to go back to the start of computing and vacuum tubes. The huge computers which existed after World War II all used vacuum tubes.

vacuum tubes are about the size of a light bulb, give or take, and were used to perform basic electronic functions such as signal amplification or switching electric currents. They were big, and they used a lot of power. They were improved upon with the development of the transistor in 1947, which was much smaller and consumed much less power. A transistor could be as small as a safety pin or a button. They allowed for electronic devices like radios to shrink from the size of a living room appliance to something you could actually hold in your hand. The next big advance occurred in 1958 by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyes of Texas Instruments, who realized that you could create all the parts of a transistor on a single piece of a semiconductor, such as germanium or silicon.

A semiconductor is, as the name suggests, a material that has a level of resistance between a conductor and an insulator. One of the first companies to commercially take advantage of both transistors and integrated circuits was Fairchild Semiconductor, which was located in Palo Alto, California, Fairchild was one of the big reasons why Santa Clara Valley became known as Silicon Valley. One of the co-founders of Fairchild was Gordon Moore. His position at the company was Director of Research. In the early 1960s, there were several advances in integrated circuits, which had profound implications. Perhaps the biggest was the creation of the Mosfit, or metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor. This was created by Bell Labs, which I previously did an episode on, and if you remember,

they invented everything. It became apparent to many people that these advances would allow for many very small transistors to fit on a single silicon chip and consumed significantly less power than the circuits which came before it. In 1965, Moore was asked to contribute an article to Electronics Magazine for their 35th anniversary. His subject was to be the future of the semiconductor industry. He wrote a very short article titled Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.

In this article, he wrote, quote, The complexity for minimum component cost has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly, over the short term, this rate can be expected to continue if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. End quote. The implication of Moore's prediction was that by the year 1975, there would be as many as 65,000 transistors on a single integrated circuit.

When 1975 rolled around, and Moore was now the president of a new computer chip manufacturer called Intel, his prediction proved to be accurate. It was at this time that a Caltech professor by the name of Carver Mead coined the term Moore's Law. While Moore's Law wasn't really a law, it did set expectations and goals for the entire computer industry that computing power would grow exponentially. I want to take an aside here to explain just how insanely powerful exponential growth is. Moore's law states that the number of transistors will double every two years. Now, imagine you have a chessboard, and on the first square of the chessboard, you put a single grain of wheat. On the second square, you put two grains of wheat, and on the third square, you put four grains of wheat. You continue doubling the number of wheat grains on each square from 8 to 16 to 32, etc.

Now, how many wheat grains will be on the chess board by the time you get to the last square? The answer is over 18 quintillion, which is over 2,000 times the annual global production of wheat. Exponential growth is insanely powerful. Some people grasp the implications of Moore's Law Variable. early on. If processing power kept doubling every two years, that meant an order of magnitude increase in power approximately every seven years. It also meant that the cost per transistor would quickly be driven down to near zero. That meant that expensive mainframe computers which took up an entire room would one day fit on a desk and maybe even your pocket. As it turned

out, Moore's law surpassed even the expectations of Moore himself. Initially, he didn't think it continue past the mid-1970s, and even by the 1970s he thought the growth wouldn't continue past the early 80s. However, it never really stopped. Technical development has kept pace with Moore's law up until today. The number of transistors on an integrated circuit went from about 2000 in 1965 to 60 billion today. In fact, some ultra-large specialty chips can now be created with 2.6 trillion transistors. The cost of a transistor has correspondingly gone down exponentially as well. A single transistor in 1960 may have cost around $8 in inflation-indjusted currency. Today, the price of a single transistor would be approximately $1.10 billion of a dollar. How does this work? How have they been

able to keep doubling the number of transistors on its ship about every two years? There is no one secret. All of the advancements made over the last 55 years since Moore's prediction have been the cumulative result of thousands of incremental improvements. One of the big things has been the ability to shrink the size of transistors. In 1970, the size of a transistor was approximately 10 microns or micrometers. The size of a transistor on the M1 chip developed by Apple, which you can buy today, is only 5 nanometers. That's an over 2,000-fold decrease in the of a transistor. One of the techniques developed to create ever smaller transistors was called photolithography. Light was literally used to burn circuits into silicon chips. However, as transistors

got smaller, they ran into a problem when the transistors were smaller than the wavelength of ultraviolet light, which is approximately 10 nanometers. This is on top of advancements in material science to make better substrates for chips, and even the development of ultra-pure clean rooms, because even a single grain of dust could ruin a chip if it landed on it. The exponential growth of Moore's law will eventually bump into physics. The width of a silicon atom is only 0.2 nanometers. And there are chips in development that will have transistors which are only 3 nanometers in size. There's only so much more that can be done to shrink the size of a transistor.

While the literal interpretation of Moore's law might be near its end, that doesn't mean computing power can't keep increasing. One of the assumptions behind Moore's Law is that an integrated circuit has a two-dimensional layout, but there's no reason why it has to be that way. Moore's Law so far has been about adding more rooms to the single story of a building. But you can add more rooms by just adding more floors to the building. 3D processors could increase the performance of current computer chips by over a thousand-fold, and it wouldn't necessarily require smaller transistors.

Likewise, performance could increase by completely rethinking what a computer is. instead of an integrated circuit, it could be something like a quantum computer, the discussion of which I'm going to leave for a future episode. In addition, we could see breakthroughs in materials such as high-temperature superconductors, and maybe even computers that use light instead of electricity. There's also been a movement to creating single-purpose chips, which do one thing and does them very well. You might be wondering, if we know that computing power is going to double every two years,

why don't we just jump ahead a couple of iterations? The answer is, it doesn't work that way. way. Back in the 1980s, the Japanese government tried to do just that. They created a moonshot project called the Fifth Generation Project, which was designed to totally leapfrog all-known computer technology and create something new. And the project was a dismal failure. As I mentioned before, advancement in computing doesn't come about from one big innovation. They come about from many small innovations. Back in 2005, engineers at Intel had no clue how they could create transistors smaller than 100 nanometers.

Many of them felt it was a physical barrier that could not be overcome. Needless to say, it was possible, and the computer chip which you are using right now to listen to my voice probably has transistors smaller than that. All of these incremental improvements, which help keep Moore's Law alive, do come at a cost, however. There is a corollary to Moore's Law, which is often known as Moore's Second Law. Moore's second law states that the price of a chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. Today, the cost of building a new chip fabrication facility can cost $16 billion, and future facilities are being quoted around $20 billion.

If you do the math, if the cost of a facility doubles every four years, and the power of processors double every two years, the cost of computing power can still go down exponentially. You might have heard news reports recently about a shortage of computer chips. This is indirectly a result of Moore's second law. The number of facilities in the world that can create state-of-the-art computer chips is shockingly small, and many of them are located in Taiwan. The creation of chip fabrication facilities requires specialty machines that are only made by a few companies on the planet,

and they are really expensive. That's why Build More Chip fabrication plants is something which is easier said. than done. To do so requires tens of billions of dollars, and the facilities take years to build because they're so complex. Gordon Moore is still around at the age of 92. He himself has been astonished that his prediction for the growth of computing power has held up for as long as it has. Even if Moore's law breaks down, which it eventually has to, there's still room to increase the power of computers for decades to come. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please join the list of patrons over at patreon.com.

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