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Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship. It is an experience-curve law, a type of law quantifying efficiency gains from experience in production.
The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and former CEO of the latter, who in 1965 noted that the number of components per integrated circuit had been doubling every year, [a] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41%. Moore's empirical evidence did not directly imply that the historical trend would continue, nevertheless his prediction has held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".
Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development, thus functioning to some extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Advancements in digital electronics, such as the reduction in quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, the increase in memory capacity (RAM and flash), the improvement of sensors, and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras, are strongly linked to Moore's law. These ongoing changes in digital electronics have been a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth.
Industry experts have not reached a consensus on exactly when Moore's law will cease to apply. Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, slightly below the pace predicted by Moore's law. In September 2022, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang considered Moore's law dead, [2] while Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger was of the opposite view. [3]
In 1959, Douglas Engelbart studied the projected downscaling of integrated circuit (IC) size, publishing his results in the article "Microelectronics, and the Art of Similitude". [4] [5] [6] Engelbart presented his findings at the 1960 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where Moore was present in the audience. [7]
In 1965, Gordon Moore, who at the time was working as the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked to contribute to the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine with a prediction on the future of the semiconductor components industry over the next ten years. [8] His response was a brief article entitled "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". [1] [9] [b] Within his editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65000 components on a single quarter-square-inch (~ 1.6 cm2) semiconductor.
The complexity for minimum component costs 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. [1]
Moore posited a log–linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time. [12] [13] In a 2015 interview, Moore noted of the 1965 article: "... I just did a wild extrapolation saying it's going to continue to double every year for the next 10 years." [14] One historian of the law cites Stigler's law of eponymy, to introduce the fact that the regular doubling of components was known to many working in the field. [13]
In 1974, Robert H. Dennard at IBM recognized the rapid MOSFET scaling technology and formulated what became known as Dennard scaling, which describes that as MOS transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant such that the power use remains in proportion with area. [15] [16] Evidence from the semiconductor industry shows that this inverse relationship between power density and areal density broke down in the mid-2000s. [17]
At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, Moore revised his forecast rate, [18] [19] predicting semiconductor complexity would continue to double annually until about 1980, after which it would decrease to a rate of doubling approximately every two years. [19] [20] [21] He outlined several contributing factors for this exponential behavior: [12] [13]
Shortly after 1975, Caltech professor Carver Mead popularized the term "Moore's law". [22] [23] Moore's law eventually came to be widely accepted as a goal for the semiconductor industry, and it was cited by competitive semiconductor manufacturers as they strove to increase processing power. Moore viewed his eponymous law as surprising and optimistic: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better." [24] The observation was even seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy. [25] [26]
The doubling period is often misquoted as 18 months because of a separate prediction by Moore's colleague, Intel executive David House. [27] In 1975, House noted that Moore's revised law of doubling transistor count every 2 years in turn implied that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months, [28] with no increase in power consumption. [29] Mathematically, Moore's law predicted that transistor count would double every 2 years due to shrinking transistor dimensions and other improvements. [30] As a consequence of shrinking dimensions, Dennard scaling predicted that power consumption per unit area would remain constant. Combining these effects, David House deduced that computer chip performance would roughly double every 18 months. Also due to Dennard scaling, this increased performance would not be accompanied by increased power, i.e., the energy-efficiency of silicon-based computer chips roughly doubles every 18 months. Dennard scaling ended in the 2000s. [17] Koomey later showed that a similar rate of efficiency improvement predated silicon chips and Moore's law, for technologies such as vacuum tubes.
Microprocessor architects report that since around 2010, semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide below the pace predicted by Moore's law. [17] Brian Krzanich, the former CEO of Intel, cited Moore's 1975 revision as a precedent for the current deceleration, which results from technical challenges and is "a natural part of the history of Moore's law". [31] [32] [33] The rate of improvement in physical dimensions known as Dennard scaling also ended in the mid-2000s. As a result, much of the semiconductor industry has shifted its focus to the needs of major computing applications rather than semiconductor scaling. [25] [34] [17] Nevertheless, leading semiconductor manufacturers TSMC and Samsung Electronics have claimed to keep pace with Moore's law [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] with 10, 7, and 5 nm nodes in mass production. [35] [36] [41] [42] [43]
As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. The cost of the tools, principally EUVL (Extreme ultraviolet lithography), used to manufacture chips doubles every 4 years. [44] Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law. [45] This led to the formulation of Moore's second law, also called Rock's law (named after Arthur Rock), which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fabrication plant also increases exponentially over time. [46] [47]
Numerous innovations by scientists and engineers have sustained Moore's law since the beginning of the IC era. Some of the key innovations are listed below, as examples of breakthroughs that have advanced integrated circuit and semiconductor device fabrication technology, allowing transistor counts to grow by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades.
Computer industry technology road maps predicted in 2001 that Moore's law would continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. [71]
One of the key technical challenges of engineering future nanoscale transistors is the design of gates. As device dimensions shrink, controlling the current flow in the thin channel becomes more difficult. Modern nanoscale transistors typically take the form of multi-gate MOSFETs, with the FinFET being the most common nanoscale transistor. The FinFET has gate dielectric on three sides of the channel. In comparison, the gate-all-around MOSFET (GAAFET) structure has even better gate control.
Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace predicted by Moore's law. [17] Brian Krzanich, the former CEO of Intel, announced, "Our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." [103] Intel stated in 2015 that improvements in MOSFET devices have slowed, starting at the 22 nm feature width around 2012, and continuing at 14 nm. [104] Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO, stated at the end of 2023 that "we're no longer in the golden era of Moore's Law, it's much, much harder now, so we're probably doubling effectively closer to every three years now, so we've definitely seen a slowing." [105]
The physical limits to transistor scaling have been reached due to source-to-drain leakage, limited gate metals and limited options for channel material. Other approaches are being investigated, which do not rely on physical scaling. These include the spin state of electron spintronics, tunnel junctions, and advanced confinement of channel materials via nano-wire geometry. [106] Spin-based logic and memory options are being developed actively in labs. [107] [108]
The vast majority of current transistors on ICs are composed principally of doped silicon and its alloys. As silicon is fabricated into single nanometer transistors, short-channel effects adversely change desired material properties of silicon as a functional transistor. Below are several non-silicon substitutes in the fabrication of small nanometer transistors.
One proposed material is indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs. Compared to their silicon and germanium counterparts, InGaAs transistors are more promising for future high-speed, low-power logic applications. Because of intrinsic characteristics of III–V compound semiconductors, quantum well and tunnel effect transistors based on InGaAs have been proposed as alternatives to more traditional MOSFET designs.
Biological computing research shows that biological material has superior information density and energy efficiency compared to silicon-based computing. [116]
Various forms of graphene are being studied for graphene electronics, e.g. graphene nanoribbon transistors have shown promise since its appearance in publications in 2008. (Bulk graphene has a band gap of zero and thus cannot be used in transistors because of its constant conductivity, an inability to turn off. The zigzag edges of the nanoribbons introduce localized energy states in the conduction and valence bands and thus a bandgap that enables switching when fabricated as a transistor. As an example, a typical GNR of width of 10 nm has a desirable bandgap energy of 0.4 eV. [117] [118] ) More research will need to be performed, however, on sub-50 nm graphene layers, as its resistivity value increases and thus electron mobility decreases. [117]
In April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the projection cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens." He also noted that transistors eventually would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:
In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions. [119]
— Gordon Moore in 2006
In 2016 the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, after using Moore's Law to drive the industry since 1998, produced its final roadmap. It no longer centered its research and development plan on Moore's law. Instead, it outlined what might be called the More than Moore strategy in which the needs of applications drive chip development, rather than a focus on semiconductor scaling. Application drivers range from smartphones to AI to data centers. [120]
IEEE began a road-mapping initiative in 2016, "Rebooting Computing", named the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS). [121]
Some forecasters, including Gordon Moore, [122] predict that Moore's law will end by around 2025. [123] [120] [124] Although Moore's Law will reach a physical limit, some forecasters are optimistic about the continuation of technological progress in a variety of other areas, including new chip architectures, quantum computing, and AI and machine learning. [125] [126] Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared Moore's law dead in 2022; [2] several days later, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger countered with the opposite claim. [3]
Digital electronics have contributed to world economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. [127] The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity, [128] which Moore's law factors into. Moore (1995) expected that "the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities". [129] The reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, however, with economists reporting that "Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation." [130] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth. [131] [132] [128]
An acceleration in the rate of semiconductor progress contributed to a surge in U.S. productivity growth, [133] [134] [135] which reached 3.4% per year in 1997–2004, outpacing the 1.6% per year during both 1972–1996 and 2005–2013. [136] As economist Richard G. Anderson notes, "Numerous studies have traced the cause of the productivity acceleration to technological innovations in the production of semiconductors that sharply reduced the prices of such components and of the products that contain them (as well as expanding the capabilities of such products)." [137]
The primary negative implication of Moore's law is that obsolescence pushes society up against the Limits to Growth. As technologies continue to rapidly "improve", they render predecessor technologies obsolete. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence often poses obstacles to smooth or continued operations. [138]
Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor", [129] at minimum cost.
Transistors per integrated circuit – The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on ICs every two years. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. The graph at the top of this article shows this trend holds true today. As of 2017 [update] , the commercially available processor possessing the highest number of transistors is the 48 core Centriq with over 18 billion transistors. [139]
Density at minimum cost per transistor – This is the formulation given in Moore's 1965 paper. [1] It is not just about the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest. [140]
As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography, this number would increase at "a rate of roughly a factor of two per year". [1]
Dennard scaling – This posits that power usage would decrease in proportion to area (both voltage and current being proportional to length) of transistors. Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years. According to Dennard scaling transistor dimensions would be scaled by 30% (0.7×) every technology generation, thus reducing their area by 50%. This would reduce the delay by 30% (0.7×) and therefore increase operating frequency by about 40% (1.4×). Finally, to keep electric field constant, voltage would be reduced by 30%, reducing energy by 65% and power (at 1.4× frequency) by 50%. [c] Therefore, in every technology generation transistor density would double, circuit becomes 40% faster, while power consumption (with twice the number of transistors) stays the same. [141] Dennard scaling ended in 2005–2010, due to leakage currents. [17]
The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling has ended, so even though Moore's law continued after that, it has not yielded proportional dividends in improved performance. [15] [142] The primary reason cited for the breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore, further increases energy costs. [15] [142] [17]
The breakdown of Dennard scaling prompted a greater focus on multicore processors, but the gains offered by switching to more cores are lower than the gains that would be achieved had Dennard scaling continued. [143] [144] In another departure from Dennard scaling, Intel microprocessors adopted a non-planar tri-gate FinFET at 22 nm in 2012 that is faster and consumes less power than a conventional planar transistor. [145] The rate of performance improvement for single-core microprocessors has slowed significantly. [146] Single-core performance was improving by 52% per year in 1986–2003 and 23% per year in 2003–2011, but slowed to just seven percent per year in 2011–2018. [146]
Quality adjusted price of IT equipment – The price of information technology (IT), computers and peripheral equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, declined 16% per year on average over the five decades from 1959 to 2009. [147] [148] The pace accelerated, however, to 23% per year in 1995–1999 triggered by faster IT innovation, [130] and later, slowed to 2% per year in 2010–2013. [147] [149]
While quality-adjusted microprocessor price improvement continues, [150] the rate of improvement likewise varies, and is not linear on a log scale. Microprocessor price improvement accelerated during the late 1990s, reaching 60% per year (halving every nine months) versus the typical 30% improvement rate (halving every two years) during the years earlier and later. [151] [152] Laptop microprocessors in particular improved 25–35% per year in 2004–2010, and slowed to 15–25% per year in 2010–2013. [153]
The number of transistors per chip cannot explain quality-adjusted microprocessor prices fully. [151] [154] [155] Moore's 1995 paper does not limit Moore's law to strict linearity or to transistor count, "The definition of 'Moore's Law' has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that on a semi-log plot approximates a straight line. I hesitate to review its origins and by doing so restrict its definition." [129]
Hard disk drive areal density – A similar prediction (sometimes called Kryder's law) was made in 2005 for hard disk drive areal density. [156] The prediction was later viewed as over-optimistic. Several decades of rapid progress in areal density slowed around 2010, from 30 to 100% per year to 10–15% per year, because of noise related to smaller grain size of the disk media, thermal stability, and writability using available magnetic fields. [157] [158]
Fiber-optic capacity – The number of bits per second that can be sent down an optical fiber increases exponentially, faster than Moore's law. Keck's law, in honor of Donald Keck. [159]
Network capacity – According to Gerald Butters, [160] [161] the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there is another version, called Butters' Law of Photonics, [162] a formulation that deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butters' law says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. [163] Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called WDM) increased the capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually. [164]
Pixels per dollar – Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted pixels per dollar as a basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens, and resolution. [165] [166] [167] [168]
The great Moore's law compensator (TGMLC), also known as Wirth's law – generally is referred to as software bloat and is the principle that successive generations of computer software increase in size and complexity, thereby offsetting the performance gains predicted by Moore's law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy, [169] formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on a year 2000 computer.
Library expansion – was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available. [170] He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission media. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of information growth in an era that now sometimes is called the Information Age.
Carlson curve – is a term coined by The Economist [171] to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson. [172] Carlson accurately predicted that the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law. [173] Carlson Curves illustrate the rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis, and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures.
Eroom's law – is a pharmaceutical drug development observation that was deliberately written as Moore's Law spelled backwards in order to contrast it with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time. It states that the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.
Experience curve effects says that each doubling of the cumulative production of virtually any product or service is accompanied by an approximate constant percentage reduction in the unit cost. The acknowledged first documented qualitative description of this dates from 1885. [174] [175] A power curve was used to describe this phenomenon in a 1936 discussion of the cost of airplanes. [176]
Edholm's law – Phil Edholm observed that the bandwidth of telecommunication networks (including the Internet) is doubling every 18 months. [177] The bandwidths of online communication networks has risen from bits per second to terabits per second. The rapid rise in online bandwidth is largely due to the same MOSFET scaling that enabled Moore's law, as telecommunications networks are built from MOSFETs. [178]
Haitz's law predicts that the brightness of LEDs increases as their manufacturing cost goes down.
Swanson's law is the observation that the price of solar photovoltaic modules tends to drop 20 percent for every doubling of cumulative shipped volume. At present rates, costs go down 75% about every 10 years.
Computer memory stores information, such as data and programs, for immediate use in the computer. The term memory is often synonymous with the terms RAM,main memory, or primary storage. Archaic synonyms for main memory include core and store.
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip, computer chip, or simply chip, is a small electronic device made up of multiple interconnected electronic components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. These components are etched onto a small piece of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Integrated circuits are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, smartphones, and televisions, to perform various functions such as processing and storing information. They have greatly impacted the field of electronics by enabling device miniaturization and enhanced functionality.
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuits (ICs) such as computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips. It is a multiple-step photolithographic and physico-chemical process during which electronic circuits are gradually created on a wafer, typically made of pure single-crystal semiconducting material. Silicon is almost always used, but various compound semiconductors are used for specialized applications.
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFETs for logic functions. CMOS technology is used for constructing integrated circuit (IC) chips, including microprocessors, microcontrollers, memory chips, and other digital logic circuits. CMOS technology is also used for analog circuits such as image sensors, data converters, RF circuits, and highly integrated transceivers for many types of communication.
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates. Both use the same cell design, consisting of floating-gate MOSFETs. They differ at the circuit level depending on whether the state of the bit line or word lines is pulled high or low: in NAND flash, the relationship between the bit line and the word lines resembles a NAND gate; in NOR flash, it resembles a NOR gate.
Miniaturization is the trend to manufacture ever-smaller mechanical, optical, and electronic products and devices. Examples include miniaturization of mobile phones, computers and vehicle engine downsizing. In electronics, the exponential scaling and miniaturization of silicon MOSFETs leads to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip doubling every two years, an observation known as Moore's law. This leads to MOS integrated circuits such as microprocessors and memory chips being built with increasing transistor density, faster performance, and lower power consumption, enabling the miniaturization of electronic devices.
The 90 nm process refers to the technology used in semiconductor manufacturing to create integrated circuits with a minimum feature size of 90 nanometers. It was an advancement over the previous 130 nm process. Eventually, it was succeeded by smaller process nodes, such as the 65 nm, 45 nm, and 32 nm processes.
Semiconductor memory is a digital electronic semiconductor device used for digital data storage, such as computer memory. It typically refers to devices in which data is stored within metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) memory cells on a silicon integrated circuit memory chip. There are numerous different types using different semiconductor technologies. The two main types of random-access memory (RAM) are static RAM (SRAM), which uses several transistors per memory cell, and dynamic RAM (DRAM), which uses a transistor and a MOS capacitor per cell. Non-volatile memory uses floating-gate memory cells, which consist of a single floating-gate transistor per cell.
A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, forming a double or even multi gate structure. These devices have been given the generic name "FinFETs" because the source/drain region forms fins on the silicon surface. The FinFET devices have significantly faster switching times and higher current density than planar CMOS technology.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It is the most common measure of integrated circuit complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observes that transistor count doubles approximately every two years. However, being directly proportional to the area of a die, transistor count does not represent how advanced the corresponding manufacturing technology is. A better indication of this is transistor density which is the ratio of a semiconductor's transistor count to its die area.
The "22 nm" node is the process step following 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch for a memory cell using the process is around 22 nm. It was first demonstrated by semiconductor companies for use in RAM memory in 2008. In 2010, Toshiba began shipping 24 nm flash memory chips, and Samsung Electronics began mass-producing 20 nm flash memory chips. The first consumer-level CPU deliveries using a 22 nm process started in April 2012 with the Intel Ivy Bridge processors.
The "14 nanometer process" refers to a marketing term for the MOSFET technology node that is the successor to the "22 nm" node. The "14 nm" was so named by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). Until about 2011, the node following "22 nm" was expected to be "16 nm". All "14 nm" nodes use FinFET technology, a type of multi-gate MOSFET technology that is a non-planar evolution of planar silicon CMOS technology.
A multigate device, multi-gate MOSFET or multi-gate field-effect transistor (MuGFET) refers to a metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) that has more than one gate on a single transistor. The multiple gates may be controlled by a single gate electrode, wherein the multiple gate surfaces act electrically as a single gate, or by independent gate electrodes. A multigate device employing independent gate electrodes is sometimes called a multiple-independent-gate field-effect transistor (MIGFET). The most widely used multi-gate devices are the FinFET and the GAAFET, which are non-planar transistors, or 3D transistors.
PMOS or pMOS logic is a family of digital circuits based on p-channel, enhancement mode metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, PMOS logic was the dominant semiconductor technology for large-scale integrated circuits before being superseded by NMOS and CMOS devices.
A three-dimensional integrated circuit is a MOS integrated circuit (IC) manufactured by stacking as many as 16 or more ICs and interconnecting them vertically using, for instance, through-silicon vias (TSVs) or Cu-Cu connections, so that they behave as a single device to achieve performance improvements at reduced power and smaller footprint than conventional two dimensional processes. The 3D IC is one of several 3D integration schemes that exploit the z-direction to achieve electrical performance benefits in microelectronics and nanoelectronics.
Random-access memory is a form of electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media, where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement.
In semiconductor manufacturing, the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems defines the "5 nm" process as the MOSFET technology node following the "7 nm" node. In 2020, Samsung and TSMC entered volume production of "5 nm" chips, manufactured for companies including Apple, Huawei, Mediatek, Qualcomm and Marvell.
The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is an annual micro- and nanoelectronics conference held each December that serves as a forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and related device technologies, design, manufacturing, physics, modeling and circuit-device interaction.
In semiconductor electronics, Dennard scaling, also known as MOSFET scaling, is a scaling law which states roughly that, as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area; both voltage and current scale (downward) with length. The law, originally formulated for MOSFETs, is based on a 1974 paper co-authored by Robert H. Dennard, after whom it is named.
We won't have the rate of progress that we've had over the last few decades. I think that's inevitable with any technology; it eventually saturates out. I guess I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so, but that's not surprising.
In the later 1990s and 2000s, architectural innovation decreased, so performance came primarily from higher clock rates and larger caches. The ending of Dennard Scaling and Moore's Law also slowed this path; single core performance improved only 3% last year!
A decade later, he revised what had become known as Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip would double every two years.
... the rate of increase of complexity can be expected to change slope in the next few years as shown in Figure 5. The new slope might approximate a doubling every two years, rather than every year, by the end of the decade.
1965: Moore's Law is born when Gordon Moore predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double roughly every year (a decade later, in 1975, Moore published an update, revising the doubling period to every 2 years)
Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months.
It's official: Moore's Law is slowing down. ... "These transitions are a natural part of the history of Moore's Law and are a by-product of the technical challenges of shrinking transistors while ensuring they can be manufactured in high volume", Krzanich said.
Year-over-year exponential computer performance scaling has ended. Complicating this is the coming disruption of the "technology escalator" underlying the industry: Moore's law.
The costs required to fabricate chips have increased in a predictable manner, operating under what is referred to Moore's Second Law or "Rock's Law", which says the cost of semiconductor tools doubles every four years.
The last two technology transitions have signaled that our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two
...the CEO stated transistors now double closer to every three years, which is actually significantly behind the pace of Moore's Law, which dictated a two-year cadence.
chart: "Faith no Moore" Selected predictions for the end of Moore's law
End of Growth of Single Program Speed?
technical progress in the semiconductor industry has continued to proceed at a rapid pace ... Advances in semiconductor technology have driven down the constant-quality prices of MPUs and other chips at a rapid rate over the past several decades.
... compared with −25% to −35% per year over 2004–2010, the annual decline plateaus around −15% to −25% over 2010–2013.
Currently 2.5-inch drives are at 500GB/platter with some at 600GB or even 667GB/platter – a long way from 20TB/platter. To reach 20TB by 2020, the 500GB/platter drives will have to increase areal density 44 times in six years. It isn't going to happen. ... Rosenthal writes: "The technical difficulties of migrating from PMR to HAMR, meant that already in 2010 the Kryder rate had slowed significantly and was not expected to return to its trend in the near future. The floods reinforced this."