Moore’s Law as Roadmap

A weather forecast does not change the weather. Moore’s Law was different in kind. Once the semiconductor industry came to believe that transistor density would double on a regular schedule, the belief became a coordinating expectation, and the expectation organized the behavior that made the prediction come true. A chip that its software cannot yet use, or that the equipment to fabricate it does not yet exist, creates no value; progress in semiconductors is not a single company sprinting but a vast relay race among suppliers, fabricators, designers, and buyers who must all advance in lockstep. Moore’s forecast solved this coordination problem by giving thousands of competing firms a shared clock to march to. Formalized eventually as a published industry technology roadmap, the Law told equipment makers what precision to target, software writers what resources to assume, and product designers what to promise customers two years out. The forecast became a roadmap became a force that shaped the trajectory it described—a self-fulfilling prophecy operating at the scale of a global industry.