Moore’s Law
George Moore’s observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years has held for approximately 40 years of technological progress. Nowadays, Moore’s law is used more flexibly to describe that technological progress continues to grow exponentially.
Example applications
The classic example in Moore’s law applies to transistors on an integrated circuit, but it has become both a target and self-fulfilling prophecy for a range of technology-related activities. Other examples include the affordability of IT equipment, hard disk drive capacity, pixels-per-dollar in digital cameras, and the cost of developing medicine.
Demonstrating Moore’s Law
To demonstrate Moore’s law, a 2-dimension scatter-plot is required, with the x-axis often describing time or money, and the y-axis as a log scale of the variable of interest.
Key concepts
- an overview of Moore’s law, including the concept of unconstrained exponential growth or doubling over time
- an example approximately demonstrating Moore’s law
- advice for the student engineer about how Moore’s law can be used to forecast future demand or requirements.
Core resources
Similar tools…
Moore’s law has many variations that have been applied to different circumstances of technological advancement. The Wikipedia page has a good list of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law.