Why the chip is improving every year

The progress of chip development follows Moore's Law, which refers to the number of transistors that can be accommodated on an IC, which doubles approximately every 18 months and doubles its performance. Moore's Law is discovered by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore after a long period of observation.

In 1965, Gordon Moore prepared a report on development trends. He compiled a list of observations. As he began to plot the data, a striking trend emerged. Each new chip contained roughly twice the capacity of its predecessor, and each chip was created within 18-24 months of the creation of the previous one. If this trend continues, computing power will rise exponentially relative to the time period.Moore's observations, now known as Moore's Law, illustrate a trend that continues to this day and remains unusually accurate. It has also been found to apply not only to the description of memory chips, but also to the precise development of processor capacity and disk drive storage capacity. The law has become the basis for many industry predictions of performance. In 26 years, the number of transistors on a chip increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300 in the first 4004 introduced in 1971 to 7.5 million in the Pentium II processor.

Due to the uniqueness of high purity silicon, the higher the integration, the cheaper the price of the fine body tube, which also leads to the economic benefits of Moore's law, in the early 1960s, a transistor to about 10, but as the transistor gets smaller and smaller, straight to a hair on the wire can be put 1000 transistors when the price of each transistor is only one thousandth of a cent. According to relevant statistics, according to the price of computing 100,000 times multiplication, IBM704 computer for 1 dollar, IBM709 down to 20 cents, and the IBM360 system computer developed at a cost of 5 billion in the mid-1960s has become 3.5 cents.

The end of Moore's Law, It's been nearly 40 years since Moore's Law was introduced. People are not surprised to see the level of semiconductor chip manufacturing process to a dizzying rate of improvement. At present, the microprocessor up to the chip Pentium 4 main frequency has been high 2G (i.e. 12,000M), in 2011 to launch a chip containing 1 billion transistors, can execute 100 billion instructions per second. People can not help but ask: this incredible pace of development will continue endlessly? No need for complex logical reasoning to know: the geometry of the components on the chip can never be reduced indefinitely, which means that one day, the number of components that can be integrated on the chip unit area will reach its limit. The question is just how much this limit, and when to reach this limit. Industry experts already expect that the growth rate of chip performance will slow down in the next few years. It is generally believed that Moore's Law can be applied for about 10 years. The constraints of the first is the technology, the second is the economy. From a technical point of view, with the increase in line density on the silicon wafer, its complexity and error rate will also grow exponentially, but also to make a comprehensive and thorough chip testing is almost impossible. Once the width of the lines on the chip reaches the nanometer (10-9 m) order of magnitude, equivalent to the size of only a few molecules, the physical and chemical properties of the material in this case will undergo qualitative changes, resulting in the use of the current process of semiconductor devices can not work properly, Moore's Law is also coming to its end. From an economic point of view, as Moore's second law, currently $ 2-3 billion to build a chip factory, line size reduction to 0.1 micron will soar to $ 10 billion, more than a nuclear power plant investment. Can not afford to spend this money, forcing more and more companies out of the chip industry. It seems that Moore's law to maintain another decade of life, but also never easy.

However, there are those who see things from a different perspective. Dan Linqi, president and CEO of an American company called CyberCash, says, "Moore's Law is a law about human creativity, not a law of physics." Those who hold similar views also believe that Moore's Law is actually a law about human belief, and that when people believe something can be done, they will try to achieve it. When Moore first made his observations, he actually gave people the belief that the trends he predicted would continue.