The End of Moore’s Law?

This phenomenon is responsible for creating the most valuable companies on Earth while completely redefining humanity's relationship with technology. So it’s particularly startling that all that is now in the past.

“Moore’s Law is dead,” pronounced Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang in September 2022, before adding, “The idea that the chip is going to go down in price is a story of the past.”

Today’s chips come packed with billions of transistors, capable of executing billions of instructions per second. The smallest transistors on the market are now hitting the 3 nanometer mark, a length equivalent to 15 Silicon atoms. But getting ever smaller presents tremendous financial, let alone physical, challenges, and many are bracing themselves for a world where achieving our digital dreams is only going to get more expensive from here.

Every major company that relies on computing is exploring ways to approach this new normal. Some are rethinking the designs of chips in their devices while others are beefing up the number of silicon experts they have in house. We can trace the evolution of chip economics and design to better understand how we got here, and explore what the future might look like as a new chapter opens up in the world of hardware.

The flow of electricity

Electricity plays a crucial role in computers: it represents the physical form of information. So to manipulate information, we first needed to figure out how to manipulate the flow of electricity.

In the early twentieth century, one of the biggest puzzles in electrical engineering was finding a mechanism that could switch electrical signals on and off—using electrical signals themselves. In 1911, Palo Alto native Lee DeForest figured out one of the first ways of doing it when he discovered the vacuum tube.

A vacuum tube is a glass vial with two components: a cathode at one end, which heats up and produces a stream of electrons, and an anode at the other end. By regulating whether or not a voltage is applied to the anode, you can control whether electrons will be permitted to pass across the vacuum from the cathode end to the anode end, powering a circuit.