Photograph of Gordon Moore superimposed over an enlargement of portions of a microprocessor.

Photograph of Gordon Moore superimposed over an enlargement of portions of a microprocessor.

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A: Palo Alto, California, United States

Gordon Moore Promulgates "Moore's Law"

4/19/1965
First page of Gordon Moore's article as it appeared in Electronics magazine, Vol. 38, number 8, April 19, 1965.

First page of Gordon Moore's article as it appeared in Electronics magazine, Vol. 38, number 8, April 19, 1965.

On April 19, 1965, while Director of the Research and Development Laboratory at Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California, physical chemist Gordon Moore published "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits" in Electronics Magazine. In this article Moore observed that the number of transistors that could be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubled approximately every two years, and predicted that this trend would continue. In 1970, after Moore had left Fairchild Semiconductor to co-found Intel Corporation, the press called this observation “Moore’s Law.”

"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 his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" had predicted that by the turn of the millennium, we would have "computers with a storage capacity of about 10^9", what today we would call "128 megabytes." 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 slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law. 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, 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." (Wikipedia article on Moore' Law, accessed 11-19-2011).

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