Do you know what 'Moore's law' is?

1/04/2012 06:13:00 PM Science 14 Comments

Can you guess the number of transistors in a PC that will be sold after 2 years by the best tech company like intel or IBM? I bet you can. All you need to know is the previous trend of approximate number of transistors and ‘Moore’s Law.
More’s Law States that the “number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an IC(integrated circuit) doubles approximately every 2 years”.

Moor's Law 1971-2011

Gordon E.Moore, an Intel co-founder, described this trend in his paper in 1965. He compared the number of components in an IC(integrated Circuit) from 1958 to 1965 and predicted that the trend will continue to grow the same way for atleast ten years.

One of the biggest technologic and R&D companies working for semiconductor devices now a days use this law for their long term planning and to achieve their target for research and development.

Until 2005, Moore’s law was BANG ON, however International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors has updated a minor changed in this law stating that the number count of transistor and the densities are to double after every 3 years from 2010.

The law is so popular that similar to Moore’s law has been devised for many other components. Some of them are explained below.

Transistors per integrated circuit.

This is the most popular formulation as explained above and is the basis of the Moore’s law , doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits 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. Recent trends show that this rate has been maintained into 2007

Hard disk storage cost per unit of information.

A similar law has been made for Hard Disk Storage per unit of information (Kryder’s Law), Stating that the “progressing storage and increate in the hard disk capacity is almost equal to the rate of increase in the transistor count”

That means the number maximum transistors that can be used inexpensively will actually be the size of hard disk that can be made or which will be available in the market.

Network capacity vs Cost

The amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. Bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually

Pixels per dollar

This formula is used to calculate the value of a digital camera.