Moore's Law

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors that can be economically fit onto an integrated circuit tends to double approximately every two years, a pace that drove decades of exponential improvement in computing power and cost. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first stated the pattern in a 1965 magazine article, based on the rate of transistor density increase he had observed over the few preceding years of the semiconductor industry, and later informally revised the doubling period. Though never a physical law in the way of a law of thermodynamics, Moore's law functioned for decades as a guiding target the semiconductor industry organized its research and manufacturing roadmaps around, becoming something of a self-fulfilling prediction. By the 2010s and 2020s the pace of transistor scaling that Moore's law describes had visibly slowed as manufacturers approached fundamental physical limits in miniaturizing transistors, leading many in the industry to describe the original doubling trend as ending or substantially slowing.