Here’s a new version of my 50th anniversary assessment of Moore’s Law, just out from the American Enterprise Institute.
Key Points
- Over the last 50 years, exponential scaling of silicon microelectronics “turned a hundred dollar chip with a few dozen transistors into a 10 dollar chip with a few billion transistors,” fulfilling Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore’s ambitious prediction, and propelling the information economy.
- Information technology, powered by Moore’s Law, provided nearly all the productivity growth of the last 40 years and promises to transform industries such as health care and education that desperately need creative disruption.
- Shrinking silicon transistors is getting more difficult as we approach fundamental atomic limits, but varied innovations—in materials, devices, state variables, and parallel architectures—will likely combine to deliver continued exponential growth in computation, data storage, sensing, and communications.
