Why do you think that Moore’s law exists? What drives it or makes it possible?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

There are several versions of Moore’s Law and corollaries of it. The basic law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. This is similar to saying that the size of individual transistors will be reduced by a factor of 0.7 every 18 months. A popular corollary is that processing power double every 18 months. The fact that Moore’s Law has worked for so long indicates that there may be several factors driving it.

Moore’s Law has been kept afloat by the astonishing progress in semiconductor manufacturing technologies that are able to fabricate smaller and smaller transistors, year by year. In turn, this requires progress in many different areas – semiconductor manufacture, encapsulation, the development of new materials such as the high?k metal gate, new transistor structures (different geometry) and, above all, progress in the photolithography used to fabricate chips. Moreover, as technologies improve they can themselves be used to create better chip?manufacturing tools.

Moore’s Law will eventually come to an end. That is not an observation from recent trends or a guess or a conjecture; it’s a certainty. Semiconductors are constructed from real materials that have an atomic structure. There is a limit to how small things can be made in the atomic world. By about 2020, transistors will be reaching the atomic limit. Once interconnections between transistors chips become just a few atoms wide, the conventional rules of electronics will no longer hold and quantum mechanical effects will begin to dominate.

Some believe that Moore’s Law will continue beyond 2020 by exploiting three?dimensional circuit design, or other forms of computing that take place at the atomic level using quantum mechanical effects or magnetism.