The exponential advancement of electronics, now known as Moore’s law, was originally presented in this graph published in 1965. Courtesy Intel Corporation.
In an article titled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” which was published in April 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors able to be put on a microchip would double approximately every 18 months. Still accurate today, this prediction is widely known as Moore’s law.
Moore’s law has held true ever since the early 1970s. Computer functionality has become faster and faster, and computerized devices can carry out more operations of greater and greater complexity.
Chemistry meets electronic engineering
Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Intel Corporation, is considered one of the first of a new breed of electronics engineers, primarily because his background was in chemistry. The first hire of the company—and one whose contributions qualify him as a founder—was Andrew Grove, a chemical engineer who went on to lead the company in the 1980s and 1990s.
As performance demands on today’s sophisticated semiconductor chips continue to grow, so does the need to manufacture larger quantities of chips with greater precision and smaller dimensions. This need requires chemical-engineering expertise to help make breakthroughs at the nanoscale.
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