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TERM PAPER

ELECTRONIC DEVICES AND

CIRCUITS
ECE201

Topic: MOORE’S LAW

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Er. Sudeep Baudha Mr. Varun chadha

Roll no. RB6803A01

Reg.No 10809505

Section B6803

+919464193411
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who gave me the possibility to complete this term
paper. I want to thank department of Electronics and communication of lovely professional university
for giving me permission to commence this term paper. I have further more to thank the p faculty
member, Er. Sudeep Baudha. I am bound to them for their stimulating support.

My friends supported me in this term paper. I want to thank them for their help, support,
interest and valuable hints.

Especially I would like to thank my sister who helped me and enabled me to complete this
term paper.

VARUN CHADHA
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Abstract of Work undertaken

Moore’s law is basically about the doubling of transistors in any chip after
about every 2 years. This doubling is due to the reason that scientist try to
increase the speed of any system by increasing the number of transistors in it.
And for it they prepare different circuits. And it is found that after every 2 years
transistors in any circuits increases. So, in this term paper i have discussed the
working of Moore’s law and its application in industry and its condition in the
future.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Content Page no.

Sr. no

1 Introduction of Moore’s law 5

2 History 6

3 Structure of Moore’s law 7

4. Working of Moore’s law 8

5. Applications of Moore’s law 10

6. Future of Moore’s law 11

7. Conclusion 13

8. References 14

Introduction of Moore’s law

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Moore's Law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware, in which the
number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled
approximately every two years. Rather than being a naturally-occurring "law" that cannot be
controlled, however, Moore's Law is effectively a business practice in which the
advancement of transistor counts occurs at a fixed rate.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law:
processing speed, memory capacity, sensors etc.
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All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically
increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.
Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late
20th and early 21st centuries. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not
expected to stop until 2015 or later.

The law is named for Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who introduced the concept in a
1965 paper. It has since been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long term planning
and to set targets for research and development.

History

The term "Moore's law" was coined around 1970 by the Caltech professor, VLSI pioneer, and
entrepreneur Carver Mead. Predictions of similar increases in computer power had existed
years prior. Alan Turing in a 1950 paper had predicted that by the turn of the millennium,
computers would have a billion words of memory. Gordon Moore is one of the founding
fathers of Silicon Valley and one of the few still alive. His famous dictum turns 40 on April
19. Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer
mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. A New
York Times article published August 31, 2009, credits Engelbart as having made the
prediction in 1959.

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his
publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19
April 1965:
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The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of
two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to
increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is
no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by
1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I
believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, bolstering the perceived accuracy
of Moore's Law in retrospect. Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a
doubling every two years. Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not
predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, an Intel colleague had factored in the
increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in
performance every 18 months.

In April 2005, Intel offered $10,000 to purchase a copy of the original Electronics Magazine.
David Clark, an engineer living in the UK, was the first to find a copy and offer it to Intel

Gordon Moore is one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley and one of the few still alive.
His famous dictum turns 40 on April 19.

Structure of Moore’s law

So now we know what is moore’s law. But question is that where did Moore's Law
come from? Only one person can give answer to it and that person is Gordon E. Moore.

In April of 1965, Electronics magazine published an article by Intel co-founder Gordon

Moore. The article and the predictions that it made have since become the stuff of legend, and
like most legends it has gone through a number of changes in the telling and retelling. The
press seized on the article's argument that semiconductor technology would usher in a new
era of electronic integration, and they distilled it into a maxim that has taken on multiple
forms over the years. Regardless of the form that the maxim takes, though, it is always given
the same name: Moore's Law.

Moore's Law is so perennially protean because its eponymous formulator never quite gave it
a precise formulation. Rather, using prose, graphs, and a cartoon Moore wove together a
collection of observations and insights in order to outline a cluster of trends that would
change the way we live and work. In the main, Moore was right, and many of his specific
predictions have come true over the years. The press, on the other hand, has met with mixed
results in its attempts to sort out exactly what Moore said and, more importantly, what he
meant.He has given an interview recently about the existence of Moore’s law. Here i have
given what moore’s told about the origin of law.

“For their 35th anniversary issue, the editor of Electronics magazine asked me to write an
article on the future of semiconductor components for the next 10 years. I wanted to get
across the idea that integrated circuits will be the way to make things cheap. So I made this
extrapolation. The biggest circuit available then had something like 30 components on it. I
looked historically and saw we'd kind of gone four, eight, sixteen and we were about
doubling every year. I didn't think it was going to be especially accurate; I just was trying to
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get the idea across that things are going to be significantly more complex and a lot cheaper,
and it turned out to be much more accurate that I had any reason to believe.

One of my friends, I believe, professor Carver Mead from Cal Tech, called this Moore's Law.
The name stuck. I couldn't utter it for about 20 years, 'til finally I got reasonably comfortable
with it.

In 1975, I updated Moore's Law, and we've been on that pretty much ever since. We're
actually a little ahead of that, we're doubling in less than 24 months these days. “

Working of Moore’s law

The way that "Moore's Law" is usually cited by those in the know is something along the
lines of: "the number of transistors that can be fit onto a square inch of silicon doubles every
12 months." The part of Moore's original 1965 paper that's usually cited in support of this
formulation is the following graph:

This graph does indeed show transistor densities doubling every 12 months, so the
formulation above is accurate. However, it doesn't quite do justice to the full scope of the
picture that Moore painted in his brief, uncannily prescient paper. This is because Moore's
paper dealt with more than just shrinking transistor sizes. Moore was ultimately interested in
shrinking transistor costs, and in the effects that cheap, ubiquitous computing power would
have on the way we live and work. This section of the present article aims to give you a
general understanding of the various trends and factors that Moore wove together to predict
the rise of the personal computer, the mobile phone, the digital wristwatch, and other
innovations that we now take for granted.

Reduced cost is one of the big attractions of integrated electronics, and the cost advantage
continues to increase as the technology evolves toward the production of larger and larger
circuit functions on a single semiconductor substrate. For simple circuits, the cost per
component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components, the result of the
equivalent piece of semiconductor in the equivalent package containing more components.
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But as components are added, decreased yields more than compensate for the increased
complexity, tending to raise the cost per component. Thus there is a minimum cost at any
given time in the evolution of the technology. At present, it is reached when 50 components
are used per circuit. But the minimum is rising rapidly while the entire cost curve is falling
(see graph below). If we look ahead five years, a plot of costs suggests that the minimum cost
per component might be expected in circuits with about 1,000 components per circuit
(providing such circuit functions can be produced in moderate quantities.) In 1970, the
manufacturing cost per component can be expected to be only a tenth of the present cost.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of
two per year (see graph on next page) [emphasis mine]. Certainly over the short term this rate
can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a
bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant
for at least 10 years.

In this section, I want to focus on the effects of improvements in cost/integration, specifically

in terms of advances in feature size. To aid our discussion, I'll first introduce a new type of
diagram. In the figure below, I've divided the CPU die into square blocks of transistors.

If we took the chip below to be a single-chip implementation of our 10,000-transistor

processor from Part I, then each of the 36 squares would have, say, 300 transistors in it.

To continue the example from the previous section, let's say we built a brand new fab, called
Fab II, with the same wafer size and same defect density, but double the transistor density of
Fab I. This would enable us to put our entire processor on a single chip using the same 36-
chip wafers that we formerly used to make the two-component version. Each of the 36 chips
would now be able to accommodate 10,666 transistors, which is enough for our 10,000-
transistor processor implementation. Doubling the transistor density allows us keep yields the
same while simultaneously cutting our packaging costs in half, because fitting twice the
transistors in the same amount of space means we no longer need to implement the processor
as two, separately packaged components. Putting more functionality into the same amount of
die space is one of the most visible ways that Moore's Law has been exploited. In fact, this is
one of two things that most people in the press are talking about when they say things like,
"Moore's Law doubles computing power" every 18-24 months.

Reducing the die size

The decrease in transistor density from Fab II to Fab III would afford us another option
beside the addition of more functionality to the same amount of die space. Instead, we could
simply reduce the die size of our processor.
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in a very general way the basic principle that a chip's power consumption is directly tied to its
die size. The more square millimeters of silicon that a design occupies, the more power it
consumes. Hence a decrease in feature size can directly translate into a decrease in power
consumption, because a smaller chip is a more energy efficient chip.

It's important to note that packing more transistors into the same unit of space increases the
power density of the chip, because there are more electronic circuits working away and
consuming power in the same amount of space. However, shrinking the die size is more than
enough to compensate for the increase in power density's effect on the over all power
dissipation of the chip.

Not surprisingly, processors' power consumption has been on the increase along with their
die sizes. Furthermore, because transistor densities have increased, power densities have
increased as well. The end result of the combination of increasing power densities and
increasing die sizes means that CPUs are fast hitting a "power wall."

Applications of Moore’s law

Moore’s law is very important for industry. As we know that Moore’s law is proving true for
more than 40 years. Now scientists know that number of transistor will double in any chip
after every 2 years. So they have challenge to prepare such a chip that will have no of
transistors double in amount before any other company, so that speed of the computer or
other device of their company can be increased before any other company.

Although Moore's law was initially made in the form of an observation and forecast, the more
widely it became accepted, the more it served as a goal for an entire industry. This drove both
marketing and engineering departments of semiconductor manufacturers to focus enormous
energy aiming for the specified increase in processing power that it was presumed one or
more of their competitors would soon actually attain. In this regard, it can be viewed as a
self-fulfilling prophecy

This can be easily cleared by the following interview of Paul Otellini, President and CEO
of Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies.

"At Intel, Moore's Law is alive and thriving," said Otellini. "We've begun production of the world's first 32nm
microprocessor, which is also the first high-performance processor to integrate graphics with the CPU.
At the same time, we're already moving ahead with development of our 22nm manufacturing technology
and have built working chips that will pave the way for production of still more powerful and more
capable processors."

So, Intel knows that doubling of transistor will affect the speed of processor so they accept the chellange and
they have produced world’s first 32nm microprocessor. This is achievement of not only Intel but also for
the Moore’s law.

Future of Moore’s law

On 13 April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the law cannot be sustained
indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out
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and eventually disaster happens." He also noted that transistors would eventually reach the
limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:

In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a
fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as
we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By
then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.

In January 1995, the Digital Alpha 21164 microprocessor had 9.3 million transistors. This
64-bit processor was a technological spearhead at the time, even if the circuit’s market share
remained average. Six years later, a state of the art microprocessor contained more than 40
million transistors. It is theorised that with further miniaturisation, by 2015 these processors
should contain more than 15 billion transistors, and by 2020 will be in molecular scale
production, where each molecule can be individually positioned.
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In 2003 Intel predicted the end would come between 2013 and 2018 with 16 nanometer
manufacturing processes and 5 nanometer gates, due to quantum tunneling, although others
suggested chips could just get bigger, or become layered. In 2008 it was noted that for the last
30 years it has been predicted that Moore's law would last at least another decade.

Some see the limits of the law as being far in the distant future. Lawrence Krauss and Glenn
D. Starkman announced an ultimate limit of around 600 years in their paper, based on
rigorous estimation of total information-processing capacity of any system in the Universe.

Then again, the law has often met obstacles that first appeared insurmountable but were
indeed surmounted before long. In that sense, Moore says he now sees his law as more
beautiful than he had realized: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets
better and better."

Gordon E. Moore thinks that this law is not going to end in near future, but it will find the
way for lasting itself.

He says to a repoter,”It seems to me in the last 10 years I read a lot of articles that did. There
was a time when I believed one micron was probably going to be the limit. We went through
that so fast it wasn't a barrier at all. Then I thought a quarter of a micron might be, but it
didn't stop it. Now we're below a tenth of a micron. We're doing one-sixty-fifth of a micron,
and I don't see it stopping, short term anyhow.”

Conclusion

In the area of electronics, the key issues are achieving improved signal processing and
development of systems on a chip. System on a chip implies increasing chip complexity and
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also better design methods, especially at the system level and achieving hardware and
software co-design. Moore's Law is therefore important in this area. In the automotive field
some of the main challenges are better design methods and improved packaging. For this
industry, Moore's Law is not the main concern. In the smart card industry Moore's Law is of
relevance as there is a need to add more to a limited area on the card. Looking towards the
end of Moore's Law, when the physical limits of silicon have been reached, nanotechnologies
may provide a way of enabling the continuation of this law. It is likely however that silicon
will still be used in conjunction with nanotechnologies. It is certainly the case however, that
many applications still need Moore's law, and will continue to do so for some time to come.

References
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1 .http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

2. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/09/moore.ars/6

3. http://www.azonano.com/news.asp?newsID=13778

4. http://www.cheshirehenbury.com/embedded/mooreslaw.html

5. http://news.cnet.com/Gordon-Moore-on-40-years-of-his-processor-law/2008-1006_3-
5657677.html

6. http://news.techworld.com/operating-systems/3477/moores-law-is-dead-says-gordon-
moore/

7. http://www.physorg.com/news176635049.html

8. ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-
Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf