The transistor celebrated its 75th birthday on Friday (16 December), just at the point where its future is in doubt, or at least its role in the future scaling of the chips that use this now ubiquitous device.
Depending on who you ask, Moore’s Law is in various states of disrepair. Part of that problem is that the law itself is a bit underspecified so people naturally impress their own beliefs on it. While it was convenient, Intel pretended that it meant compute performance. Why? The company was pushing up clock speeds in a trend allowed by another of electronics’ informal laws, devised by IBM researcher Bob Dennard in the 1970s. A few years later that law slammed into the wall and Intel went back to talking about transistor density. Even that is a bit an illusion.
Though Gordon Moore put some meat on the bones a decade after writing about the trend he observed in the mid-1960s when the silicon industry was just getting underway, he was careful to talk...