question: How is Moore's law supposed to hold up over time?
comment: Moore's law isn't a physical law like the law of gravity. It's remarkable that it has held true as long as it has, but there's no reason to believe it will hold true indefinitely.
passages: Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend and not a physical or natural law. Although the rate held steady from 1975 until around 2012, the rate was faster during the first decade. In general, it is not logically sound to extrapolate from the historical growth rate into the indefinite future. For example, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth would slow around 2013, and in 2015 Gordon Moore foresaw that the rate of progress would reach saturation: "I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so."
   Although Moore’s prediction had been realized until around 2012, Intel announced in 2015 that the pace was slowing to a halt. Thomas Wenisch, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, thinks the stagnant development of chips with denser transistors would create a problem for areas like mobile devices, data centers, and self-driving cars on different timescales. Without Moore's Law as the feedstock of innovation in computing, technology companies have to work harder to achieve new development levels (e.g. to get a new breakthrough on Polanyi's paradox).
   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.
  
  His reasoning was a log-linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time.
   A negative implication of Moore's law is obsolescence, that is, as technologies continue to rapidly "improve", these improvements may be significant enough to render predecessor technologies obsolete rapidly. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence may pose obstacles to smooth or continued operations.
   Technological change is a combination of more and of better technology. A 2011 study in the journal "Science" showed that the peak of the rate of change of the world's capacity to compute information was in 1998, when the world's technological capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers grew at 88% per year. Since then, technological change clearly has slowed. In recent times, every new year allowed humans to carry out roughly 60% more computation than possibly could have been executed by all existing general-purpose computers in the year before. This still is exponential, but shows that the rate of technological change varies over time.
   Computer industry technology road maps predicted in 2001 that Moore's law would continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade. The semiconductor industry technology roadmap used a three-year doubling time for microprocessors, leading to a tenfold increase in a decade. Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics could continue during the following decade, and in 2008 as predicting the trend through 2029.
  
  Section::::Major enabling factors.:Recent trends.
   The IEDM is where "Moore’s Law" got its name, as Gordon Moore first published his predictions in an article in "Electronics Magazine" in 1965. Ten years later he refined them in a talk at the IEDM, and from that point on people began referring to them as Moore's Law. Moore’s Law states that the complexity of integrated circuits would double approximately every two years.
   Moore's law has affected the performance of other technologies significantly: Michael S. Malone wrote of a Moore's War following the apparent success of shock and awe in the early days of the Iraq War. Progress in the development of guided weapons depends on electronic technology. Improvements in circuit density and low-power operation associated with Moore's law also have contributed to the development of technologies including mobile telephones and 3-D printing.
  
  Section::::Other formulations and similar observations.
   Because of the toxic materials used in the production of modern computers, obsolescence, if not properly managed, may lead to harmful environmental impacts. On the other hand, obsolescence may sometimes be desirable to a company which can profit immensely from the regular purchase of what is often expensive new equipment instead of retaining one device for a longer period of time. Those in the industry are well aware of this, and may utilize planned obsolescence as a method of increasing profits.
   The period is often quoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Intel executive David House (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).
  
  Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development (R&D).
   Section::::Driving the future via an application focus.
  
  Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025.
  
  In April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the projection cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens." He also noted that transistors eventually would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:
   Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor", at minimum cost.
   Numerous innovations by scientists and engineers have sustained Moore's law since the beginning of the integrated circuit (IC) era. Some of the key innovations are listed below, as examples of breakthroughs that have advanced integrated circuit and semiconductor device fabrication technology, allowing transistor counts to grow by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades.
   In April 2005, Intel offered US$10,000 to purchase a copy of the original "Electronics" issue in which Moore's article appeared. An engineer living in the United Kingdom was the first to find a copy and offer it to Intel.
  
  In the late 2010s, only two semiconductor manufacturers have been able to produce semiconductor nodes that keep pace with Moore's law, TSMC and Samsung Electronics, with 10 nm, 7 nm and 5 nm nodes in production (and plans for 3 nm nodes), whereas the pace has slowed down for Intel and other semiconductor manufacturers.
  
  Section::::History.:Moore's second law.
   Moore's Law is the observation articulated by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be fitted onto an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Moore's law has significantly contributed to the advancement of machine learning and AI. The larger and larger capacity of a chip allows for the advent of extremely small data-collecting devices, which could be placed on any intelligent machine. Innovations resulted from the exponentially growing power of computer chips include mobile apps, video games, spreadsheets, and accurate weather forecasts.
   In a series of published articles from 1974–1979, and then in his 1988 book "Mind Children", computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore's law to make predictions about the future of artificial life. Moore's law describes an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits. Moravec extends this to include technologies from long before the integrated circuit to future forms of technology. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in which robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030–2040.
   At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, Moore revised the forecast rate. Semiconductor complexity would continue to double annually until about 1980 after which it would decrease to a rate of doubling approximately every two years. He outlined several contributing factors for this exponential behavior:
  
  BULLET::::- die sizes were increasing at an exponential rate and as defective densities decreased, chip manufacturers could work with larger areas without losing reduction yields;
  
  BULLET::::- simultaneous evolution to finer minimum dimensions;
  
  BULLET::::- and what Moore called "circuit and device cleverness".
  
  Shortly after 1975, Caltech professor Carver Mead popularized the term "Moore's law".
   BULLET::::- In 2018, Samsung Electronics began commercial production of a 5 nm process, using FinFET and EUV technology. In early 2019, TSMC began commercial production of their own 5 nm process.
  
  BULLET::::- Samsung and TSMC have presented plans to manufacture 3nm GAAFET nodes by 20212022.
  
  New technology advances may help sustain Moore's law through improved performance, with or without reduced feature size.
   Moore's law came to be widely accepted as a goal for the industry, and it was cited by competitive semiconductor manufacturers as they strove to increase processing power. Moore viewed his eponymous law as surprising and optimistic: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better." The observation was even seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, the rate of improvement in physical dimensions known as Dennard scaling (MOSFET scaling) has slowed for most semiconductor manufacturers in recent years, with much of the industry shifting "circa" 2016, shifting from using semiconductor scaling as a driver to more of a focus on meeting the needs of major computing applications.
   In 1965, Moore was working as the director of research and development (R&D) at Fairchild Semiconductor. He was asked by Electronics Magazine to predict what was going to happen in the semiconductor components industry over the next ten years. In an article published on April 19, 1965, Moore observed that the number of components (transistors, resistors, diodes, or capacitors) in a dense integrated circuit had doubled approximately every year and speculated that it would continue to do so for at least the next ten years. In 1975, he revised the forecast rate to approximately every two years. Carver Mead popularized the phrase "Moore's law." The prediction has become a target for miniaturization in the semiconductor industry and has had widespread impact in many areas of technological change.
   Moore's law
  
  Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.4%. 
   Section::::History.
  
  In 1959, Douglas Engelbart discussed the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in the article "Microelectronics, and the Art of Similitude". Engelbart presented his ideas at the 1960 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where Moore was present in the audience.
   As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography, this number would increase at "a rate of roughly a factor of two per year".
   Despite a popular misconception, Moore is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in "performance" every 18 months.
   BULLET::::- Intel press kit – released for Moore's Law's 40th anniversary, with a 1965 sketch by Moore
  
  BULLET::::- The Lives and Death of Moore's Law – by Ilkka Tuomi; a detailed study on Moore's Law and its historical evolution and its criticism by Kurzweil
  
  BULLET::::- No Technology has been more disruptive... Slide show of microchip growth
  
  BULLET::::- Intel (IA-32) CPU speeds 1994–2005 – speed increases in recent years have seemed to slow down with regard to percentage increase per year (available in PDF or PNG format)
  
  BULLET::::- International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS)
  
raw_presuppositions: Moore's law is a constant, like a physical law.
raw_corrections: Moore's law is an empirical observation, not a physical law.