What was Moore’s law?
In 1965, Gordon Moore – Director of Research and Development at Fairchild Semiconductor – wrote an article for Electronics magazine in which he analysed the exponential growth in the number of components that could be built onto a single silicon chip.
He said that he saw no reason to believe this rate of growth could not continue.
Over the following decade, this observation became baked into the technology industry and Moore’s weakly-worded prediction became known as Moore’s Law.
What has Moore’s Law become?
Although Moore’s article was about reduction in the physical size of technology – cramming more components onto a silicon chip – it has become the phrase that we use to describe the exponential growth in the power, size, speed and performance of information technology.
All the laws
A myriad of ‘laws’ have emerged over the decades to take the idea of Moore’s Law and apply it to other elements of technology development. They include:
- Keck’s law – the amount of data that can be transmitted through a fibre-optic cable
- Kryder’s law – the density of data on a hard disk drive (HDD)
- Hendy’s law – the number of pixels on a digital camera, per dollar spent
- Haitz’s law – the amount of brightness you can get from an LED, per dollar spent
- Koomey’s law – the number of computations a chip can do per joule of energy
- etc…
They all tell a similar story; measuring growth in the power and performance of information technology to show exponential improvement.
And six decades after Gordon Moore’s original article, the broad trend continues.