CONCEPT
Moore's Law
Gordon Moore's 1965 observation — extrapolated from six data points — that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years, acquiring the force of a self-fulfilling prophecy that organized a three-trillion-dollar industry for half a century.
Moore's Law began as the most modest kind of scientific claim: a trend line drawn through six data points in the spring of 1965, published in Electronics magazine by a thirty-six-year-old chemist at Fairchild Semiconductor. Moore did not propose a theory, a mechanism, or an equation derived from first principles — he noticed a pattern, stated it plainly, and extrapolated it ten years forward. The prediction of sixty-five thousand components per chip by 1975 proved almost exactly correct, and the line held for fifty years. What made the observation a law was not the physics but the economics: each doubling reduced cost per transistor, cheaper computation enabled larger markets, larger markets justified larger investments in the next doubling, and the cycle synchronized an entire global industry to a metronome Moore had set by drawing six points on semi-logarithmic paper.
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