Solution to Moore’s Law

Folks,

In a recent post, I discussed Moore’s Law. I challenged readers to solve for “a” and “b” from the equation a*2^(b*(year-1970)) from the graph in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Moore’s Law: Note that in 1982, ICs had about 100,000 transistors, whereas in 2016, they had about 10^10.

Moore’s Law posits that the number of transistors doubles every two years. If so, “b” should be 0.5. It ends up that “b”, from the solution in Figure 2, is 0.4885, so a double occurs about 1/0.4885 =2.047 years, but this number is really close to two years. The solution follows:

Figure 2. The Solution of a and b in the Moore’s law equation. 

BTW, congrats to Indium Corporation’s Dr. Huaguang Wang as he got a close solution.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron

This entry was posted in Dr. Ron and tagged , by Dr. Ron. Bookmark the permalink.

About Dr. Ron

Materials expert Dr. Ron Lasky is a professor of engineering and senior lecturer at Dartmouth, and senior technologist at Indium Corp. He has a Ph.D. in materials science from Cornell University, and is a prolific author and lecturer, having published more than 40 papers. He received the SMTA Founders Award in 2003.