How Moore's Law Works

it's called Moore's law. That's right, and uh, don't let the name fool you. It's it's not actually a law. You're not gonna get in trouble. If you break it, you'll probably get a round of applause. Moore's laws is more of a concept that's kind of been tweaked a bit over the years. It's not exactly the same thing as it was when Gordon Moore proposed it back in nineteen sixty five, but in general the concept remains pretty

much the same. Yeah. As a matter of fact, Gordon Moore, who was the founder of intel Um, actually didn't even want to call it More's law. His friend from cal Tech a professor cal Tech, decided to call it More's law.

It was a concept that doctor Moore Um proposed than a paper with the exciting title Cramming More Components on the Integrated Circuits that was published in Electronics magazine in ninet And basically what War's law is is, you know, he said, as you make uh semiconductors, the more transistors that you put on a chip, you will be able to duck to double that within the span of a year. And uh, you know, he actually had to revise it. It's not a law. He had to revise it because

of the way they manufacture chips. That actually went up to uh one and a half years and then two years, and you know, now it's starting to slip a little bit as the laws of physics are catching up with manufacturing, right. And and the definition was tweaked also by saying, okay, instead of just saying the number of transistors, maybe maybe we should word that as in a computing power, like every two years, the computing power on a on a

chip doubles um. And this has pretty much been holding truth throughout the history of of electronics and computing, uh, mainly because not not from a technological standpoint, although that plays a huge role as people improve manufacturing techniques and things like that, But really from a commercial and social standpoint, we're talking about companies that they have to meet expectations now because everyone knows about Moore's Law, and everyone knows

that a computer has to be twice as powerful as it was two years ago, and now companies feel like that that's actually a standard they have to meet. It's no longer dictated by technology, it's dictated by expectation. Yeah, that's that's true. Um. If you go into Intel's website, they actually have a section of the site dedicated to Moore's Law, and if you read through it, you know, you don't even really have to read very deeply into it.

They talk about how they are attempting to keep that standard. So it's it's kind of funny that, you know, it's it's this nebulous artificial Yeah. Yeah, but they're they're trying

to make it happen. One of the funny things about Dr Moore's prophecy, though, in in nineteen sixty five, is um he said that in his paper he says that if they are able to meet these standards, that we would be able to have certain conveniences, you know, can that are able to uh to make our lives easier, such as you know, computers in the home or mobile

communications devices. So he predicted cell phones. Yeah. Um. The the interesting thing here is that Moore's law can't go on forever, and that's because of the laws of physics. The laws of physics state, specifically quantum physics that when you get down to a certain level, uh, things, the things that a circuit needs to be able to do, you just can't do at a certain size. And we're talking about just a few nanometers in size, and a nanometer is a billion of the eater, so it's very

very tiny. Well, at five nanometers, a logic gate can no longer perform, electron gate can no longer perform what's meant to do? Now? These gates, what they do is they allow electrons to pass through or not pass through. That ends up translating into a one or a zero basic bits here. But an electron gate that's five nanometers are smaller in size, can't do that because an electron can tunnel through it. It doesn't actually make a hole,

it just passes through. It's as if it's on one side at one moment and on the other side of the other, and and somehow it just passes through. It's one of those weird things about quantum mechanics. So you can't make anything that size because you can't control the electrons. So that that's that's really the limit. Even if we figure out a way of making things that's small, it

won't work. I also read that of course, as you increase the number of transitions, you're also increasing the amount of electricity that it needs, and that also affects the amount of cool ing that you're going to have to have because that everything up so um. It's just a matter of time, I guess, before we reach the end of Moore's law, and then we'll have to see what manufacturers do to to, you know, just pump up computers and electronics just that much more, right, whatever tricks they

pull out of their bags. Well, if you'd like to read more about articles that in which we mentioned More's law, and you can read Jonathan's how quantum computing will work and how PCs work, And there are several others on how stuff works dot com that are up today that you can check out. So for now, thank you. Very much for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot Com Let

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