The Exponential Growth of Technology

An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, and an iPhone, released 2007. The Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, cost 10 times as much, and has a 100th the processing power of the iPhone.

Moore's Law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware.  The number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. The trend has continued for more than half a century and is not expected to stop until 2015 or later.

The capabilities of many digital electronic devices are strongly linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.  All of these are improving at exponential rates as well.  This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.  Moore's law precisely describes a driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. 

The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.  The paper noted that number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years."  His prediction has proved to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.