Gordon Moore on Moore's Law
from the CUCUG Status Register, July 2002
Last week, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House, along with several other recipients. Moore is most famous perhaps for Moore's Law, which states that the number of transistors on CPUs doubles about every 18 months. Moore defined the law 30 years ago, and it has had dead-on predictive power since. Following the receipt of his award, Moore took questions from a few journalists.
In answer to questions about whether Moore's Law would extend for years into the future as a result of nanotechnology and other technology breakthroughs, Moore said nanotechnology wasn't necessarily the Holy Grail. "We'll go a long way by doing what we've done in the past. We'll get down to 30-nanometer dimensions or so. Nanotechnology, where you're taking the approach from the other end and coming up is certainly going to be interesting, but I don't think -- at least not at first, maybe never -- that it's going to replace the kinds of things we've been doing. Making a small device is one thing, but hooking up a million of them on a chip is something completely different."
Moore also reminded journalists that he had changed the law once already, in 1975. "I went from predicting that complexity would double every year to doubling every 18 months." Doubling time will slow down when we can no longer take advantage of just making things smaller. We could go to four or five years."