Moore’s Law

At the end of the 1970s, Moore's Law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. Moore's law is the empirical observation that the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, increases at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... A similar law has held for hard disk storage cost per unit of information. The rate of progression in disk storage over the past decades has actually sped up more than once, corresponding to the utilization of error correcting codes, the magnetoresistive effect and the giant magnetoresistive effect. The current rate of increase in hard drive capacity is roughly similar to the rate of increase in transistor count and has been dubbed Kryder's law. However, recent trends show that this rate is dropping, and has not been met for the last three years. (A factor in this analysis is the greatly increased use of solid state drives, as opposed to disc.) Another version states that RAM storage capacity increases at the same rate as processing power. However, memory speeds have not increased as fast as CPU speeds in recent years, leading to a heavy reliance on caching in current computer systems. Although Moore's law was initially made in the form of an observation and prediction, the more widely it became accepted, the more it served as a goal for an entire industry. As the cost to the consumer of computer power falls, the cost for producers to achieve Moore's Law has the opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. As the cost of semiconductor equipment is expected to continue increasing, manufacturers must sell larger and larger quantities of chips to remain profitable. In recent years, analysts have observed a decline in the number of "design starts" at advanced process nodes While these observations were made in the period after the year 2000 economic downturn, the decline may be evidence that traditional manufacturers in the long-term global market cannot economically sustain Moore's Law.