Tag Archives: Moore’s Law

Solution to Moore’s Law

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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

Checking Moore’s Law

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Folks,

Moore’s Law was developed by Gordon Moore in 1965. It predicted that the number of transistors in integrate circuits would double approximately every two years. Surprisingly, it has held true up to today. Figure 1 shows some of the integrated circuit transistor counts as a function of time. The red line is a good fit.

Figure 1. A plot of transistor count in selected ICs as a function of the year.

A reasonable equation for the red line is Transistor Count = a*2^(b*(year-1970)). What should “b” be if the count doubles every two years? To the first person that can solve for “a” and “b” using the red line and the equation above, we will send a Dartmouth sweatshirt.

Cheers,

Dr. Ron