The Trend of Different Parameters for Designing Integrated Circuits from 1973 to 2019 and Linked to Moore's Law

Abstract

The number of transistors per chip, feature sizes, frequencies, transistor densities, number of cores, thermal design powers, die areas, and storage capacities of Integrated Circuits (ICs) used for different processing units and memories were collected from various websites from 1973 to 2019 and plotted against year of introduction of ICs in semi-log paper to find the trend with R-squared (R2) value using Microsoft Excel. The R2 values of the trend lines for the above parameters were over 0.922 which indicated that more than 92% of data satisfied the fitting lines except for thermal design power (R2 = 0.7) and die area (R2 = 0.4 to 0.6). It was observed that the growths of transistor counts, transistor densities, frequencies, and thermal design powers for different processing units were growing exponentially and doubled every 16.8 to 24 months from 1973 to 2019 except the growth of thermal design powers (TDP) and frequencies of ICs which were increased up to 2003. After that, the growth of TDP and frequencies are nearly linear up to the present day. The growth of the above parameters for ICs of different memories was a little faster, it was doubled every 14 to 16 months. The feature sizes shrunk 2 times every 18 months. A strong relation was found between feature sizes and transistor densities (R2 = 0.9) and observed that one fold of feature size decreased for the increasing of 2-3 folds of transistor densities. It was observed that different parameters for ICs designing from 1973 to 2019 kept pace with Moore's law. It may be concluded that the decrease of feature size, increasing of transistor count and transistor density in ICs design will follow Moore's law for some more years with the limitation of frequency and power of ICs.