His famous dictum turned 40 by April 19.
Intel last week offered $10,000 for a mint-condition copy of the April 19, 1965, issue of Electronics magazine. In that issue, Gordon Moore declared the integrated circuit was the future of electronics and predicted the rate of improvement for the semiconductor industry.
At least one copy is already missing from the University of Illinois.
He spoke to reporters recently about the electronics industry's progress, artificial intelligence, the emergence of China and the early days of the industry.
Is there anything coming down the pike that could replace silicon?
Moore: Some of these other things, quantum dots and nanotechnology and that kind of thing--I will admit to being a skeptic around those things replacing mainstream digital silicon. You can clearly make a tiny little transistor by these techniques with potentially great high frequency, but can you connect a billion of them together? That's really the problem; it's not making a small transistor.
How many times did people predict the end of Moore's Law, and how many times were you actually concerned it was going to happen?
Moore: It seems to me in the last 10 years I read a lot of articles that did. There was a time when I believed one micron was probably going to be the limit. We went through that so fast it wasn't a barrier at all. Then I thought a quarter of a micron might be, but it didn't stop it. Now we're below a tenth of a micron. Heck, we're doing one-sixty-fifth of a micron, and I don't see it stopping, short term anyhow.
His presentation for IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference : No Exponential is Forever … but We Can Delay "Forever" (Acrobat PDF file, 2005 KB)
