Moore’s Law at 50: The performance and prospects of the exponential economy

Key Points

• Over the last 50 years, exponential scaling of silicon microelectronics “turned a hundred dollar chip with a few dozen transistors into a 10 dollar chip with a few billion transistors,” fulfilling Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore’s ambitious prediction, and propelling the information economy.
• Information technology, powered by Moore’s Law, provided nearly all the productivity growth of the last 40 years and promises to transform industries, such as health care and education, which desperately need creative disruption.
• Shrinking silicon transistors is getting more difficult as we approach fundamental atomic limits, but varied innovations—in materials, devices, state variables, and parallel architectures—will likely combine to deliver continued exponential growth in computation, data storage, sensing, and communications.

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Executive Summary

Fifty years ago, semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore offered a theory of exponential improvement for electronics. Integrated circuits, he estimated, could get smaller, faster, and cheaper at an astounding rate—doubling in cost performance every one to two years. “Moore’s Law” has proven more or less true ever since. Today, however, many think Moore’s Law has already run out of steam. Others argue that information technology has become even more efficient and thus dangerously powerful.

The bulk of the evidence suggests information technology has delivered both technically and economically: it has achieved the promise of Moore’s Law in both its narrowest sense of transistor scaling and its broadest effect of widespread economic uplift. The effects of Moore’s Law are especially evident in information technology (IT), which has provided nearly all the productivity growth in the US economy over the last 40 years. IT has also powered a wave of globalization that has brought two billion people around the world out of material poverty. In short, Moore’s Law has been both a chief driver and an exemplar of the American experiment.

Although Moore’s Law may not continue to scale using the conventional metrics, such as transistor counts, a variety of innovations in materials, devices, state variables, and parallel architectures will likely combine to deliver continued exponential growth in computation, storage, and communications. Far from reaching an end point, information technology will help transform a number of lagging industries, including health care and education.

This paper examines the technical achievements and economic impact of Moore’s Law; the public policies that encouraged rapid innovation in information technology and the way IT, in turn, helped foster greater freedom around the world; and the technical future of Moore’s Law and the economic potential of IT.

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