"News of the death of Moore's law has always been greatly exaggerated. People started to pronounce it deceased not long after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, a chipmaker, published on April 19th 1965 a paper arguing that the number of transistors that can be etched on a given surface area of silicon would double every year. In a later paper he corrected his forecast to every two years, which has come to be stated as his "law". Regularly proving sceptics wrong, however, the exponential growth kept going (see chart), driving the digital revolution. Yet signs are multiplying that half a century later, the law is running out of steam. It is not so much that physical limits are getting in the way-even though producing transistors only 14 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide, the current state of the art can be quite tricky. Intel says that it can keep the law going for at least another ten years, eventually slimming its transistors down to 5nm, about the thickness of a cell membrane. Other than shrinking circuitry further, it has also started to stack components, in effect building 3D chips.
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