Intel’s Gordon Moore Celebrates Fifty Years Of ICs

Prediction Accurate, 44 Years Later

Few scientific predictions have been more on target.

Every measure of the capabilities of electronic digital devices is strongly tied to Moore’s Law, because they all rely on silicon processors for computing power. Processing speed, memory capacity, even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras all can be related to Moore’s Law.

All of these are improving performance at exponential rates. Moore’s law has been the best description of this driving force of technological change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Moore said that he believes there are still several good years of silicon chip development (“Maybe five,” he said) left before the industry would have to move on to something else. Thus, Moore’s Law should be relevant until about 2014.

“These things [processors] just cannot get too much smaller,” Moore said. “Of course, we’re still nowhere near the size of an atom, and that’s as small as anything can ever get. What are we getting down to now? 21 nanometers, I think, is what Intel is working on now.”

Intel’s most recent Westmere chips measure 32 nanometers across.

“It’s going to take a monstrous investment to move processors off silicon and find something else,” Moore said. “We’ve already got full chemistry labs on a chip, and so on. The chips we use for triggers for car airbags are minuscule and very impressive. We’ve done amazing things, really, with the first 50 years of integrated processors.”

Looking back, Moore admitted, not every project went as planned. In fact, he said, many mistakes were made by his companies. It’s all part of the experience, he said.

Any mistakes?

“Along the way, we did make lots of mistakes,” Moore said. “The $15 million watch we tried to develop in 1975 was one of them. This was going to be an all-everything product: It was a watch, computer, weather predictor, and it was supposed to do lots of other things, all powered by a hard disk. But the performance was terrible. Turns out we weren’t very good at the watch business.”

What was the hardest decision he had to make?

“Easy,” Moore said. “Anytime we had to lay off people was extremely difficult. During the oil crisis in the 1974, and during a Silicon Valley recession in 1985, we had to shut down plants and let go about people — some 9,000 one time. That’s always the hardest thing to do.”

Curiously, Moore, who resides with his wife, Betty, in Woodside, California, doesn’t use a lot of chip-loaded gadgets himself. “I have a cellphone and a computer. That’s about it,” he said.

Has there been anything in IT development over the past few years that has surprised him? “No. Nothing lately has surprised me,” Moore said.

Naturally. He’s already seen just about everything.