Moore’s Law
Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, pp. 114–117, April 19, 1965.
Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits
• A manifesto about the promise of integrations
• Gordon Moore predicts a huge range of applications
• And a bunch of advantages
• He’s selling hard!
The promise
• Apps -- scientific advancement, home computers, automatic auto control, cell phones, electronic wrist watches, large scale data processing, and communication networks.
The Promise
• Reliability
• Compactness
• Weight
• Power efficiency
• Simpler designs -- see 8008 to 8086 evolution
Moore’s Law
• The number of minimum cost xtrs per die increases exponentially
• Density decreases cost
• Yield problems increases cost
Moore’s Law
• xtrs count double s every year.
• Not quite right
• Moore’s law: 250 xtrs in 2009
• Reality: 232
• Probably fewer “cheapest”
year xtrs1962 101965 501970 10001975 65,000
Moore’s Law
• Since 1975
• 1,100 x decrease in feature size
• 1.2M x increase in density
• About 45% per year. Doubling every 22 months.
Observations
• Other components (caps, inductors) will be elusive.
• Constant power scaling (formalized by Dennard)
• Chip size is roughly constant
• Moore says 1/4 sq. in. = 161mm2
Observations
• Very optimistic about reliability.
• Electron beam lithography (this is still just a few years away)
• Multiple metal layers!!!
• Other technologies
• attaching active components to “thin film arrays”
Corollaries to Moore’s Law
• Moore’s law performance scaling
• Switching speed goes up with decreasing feature sizes -- Moore doesn’t comment on this.
• We have leveraged density + switching speed to increase performance roughly with Moore’s law.
Performance Growth
Performance grows faster than Moore’s law (45%/year)An In-Depth Look at Computer Performance Growth, Magnus Ekman, Fredrik Warg, and Jim Nilsson, CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, Department of Computer Engineering technical report 2004-9, 2004.
Beating Moore
An In-Depth Look at Computer Performance Growth, Magnus Ekman, Fredrik Warg, and Jim Nilsson, CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, Department of Computer Engineering technical report 2004-9, 2004.
In Context
• It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the impact of Moore’s law.
• However...
• Note that it’s not about performance.
• It’s strictly about density.
• Not that this stops anyone from abusing it.
• A pretty compelling vision for what integrated circuit could do.
More on Scaling
• Seminal paper on scaling is Dennard et. al. “Design of ion-implanted MOSFET's with very small physical dimensions”, 1974
• Lays out how to truly scalable transistors.
Dennardian Breakdown
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Vdd/Vt
• The problem with leakage