The Forever Exponential? Moore's Law: Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Moore's Law has governed the semiconductor industry for over five decades and the resulting technologies have fundamentally changed the world. How has Moore's law evolved historically and what is its future? Gordon Moore himself said that “No exponential is forever,” but innovation has kept it going far longer than many had prognosticated. While the number of components on a chip has increased steadily over this time horizon, the way in which this has been achieved has evolved many times. Bipolar transistors gave way to MOS transistors, planar transistors to FinFETs, aluminum wires to copper wires. What does the future of Moore's Law hold? What innovations will power it over the next decade and beyond? Topics to be discussed include transistor scaling, interconnect scaling and heterogeneous integration.