Moore's Law Is Ending... So, What's Next?

Moore's law refers to an observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. He noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore's law predicts that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, who later founded Intel Corporation,wrote an essay for Electronics Magazine. In it, he attempted to do the impossible – predict the future. He opined that the newly trendy technology of computer chips would become doubly powerful every two years at low cost, and they would eventually be so small, that they could be embedded in homes, cars and what he referred to as “personal portable communications equipment.”  That’s right, he predicted mobile phones.

For once, a prophecy came through with flying colours – his theory, now known as Moore’s Law, has been the bedrock of modern computing. People have likened Moore’s Law to Silicon Valley’s beating heart – it powered the massive revolution in electronics that led us to the iPhone, the Internet and even greater advances like genome sequencing and drug discovery.

Of course, it isn’t an actual physical law – technology companies have chosen to follow its course. As companies cram more and more functionality into devices, we come to expect it unconditionally of every new generation. Chipmakers rush to create more powerful, even smaller chips and so it continues.

According to a report by McKinsey and Co, up to 40 percent of the global productivity growth during the last two decades has been put down to the expansion of technologies made possible by chip performance and price.

But we are nearing the end. This principle, by which the technology industry has mapped out its progress over the last half-century, has become outdated and unviable. And we shouldn’t be singing a swansong for its demise. Instead, we should celebrate the fact that the industry will finally be forced to become far more inventive, without its guaranteed path of innovation.

"This is a key inflection point – we may not actually need faster, better, smaller chips."


So what exactly did Moore predict and why won’t it be true anymore?

The law says that the number of transistors that could fit on a silicon chip would double every two years.  Today, billions of transistors can fit on a chip the size of a five pence coin; what used to cost the equivalent of $8 (£5.75) now costs mere pennies.

This has meant that every couple of years our devices become more powerful, smaller and cheaper. Silicon chips made by the likes of Intel power everything from mobile phones to watches, cars, and power plants. Entirely new devices – wearables and smartphones – have emerged.

But now, the whole economic engine based on that growth model is drawing to a halt. This is because transistors are getting too small to actually manufacture efficiently.

The beginning of the end started about a decade ago when the size of transistors – less than 90nm, or a hundredth of the width of a human hair – led to overheating. The problem was solved by limiting the speed of the processors, so they couldn’t generate too much heat. But the problems continued.

Transistors were set so close to each other that they were interfering with one another’s functions. They are now approaching a size so ridiculously small at 28nm or below, that they won’t follow the normal laws of physics such as gravity – they will soon be impacted by “quantum effects” which means their behaviour becomes unpredictable, and we can’t use them in nuclear power stations and rail networks.