Gordon Moore, the man who co-founded two heavyweight semiconductor companies and came up with the observation known as Moore’s Law, passed away late Friday in Hawaii at the age of 94. Moore co-founded Fairchild Semiconductors and another U.S. chip designer that you might have heard of…Intel. Even with these achievements, it was a simple observation made by Moore that was his claim to fame. That observation is known as Moore’s Law and we refer to it from time to time at PhoneArena.
Moore’s observation about transistor counts in microchips became Moore’s Law
The original observation was made in an article Moore wrote for Electronics Magazine titled, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” The article was found in the April 19, 1965 edition, and in it, Moore wrote that “the complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly two per year.”
There’s no doubt that consumers who need their mobile devices owe a debt of gratitude to Moore. Morris Chang, founder of the world’s largest foundry, TSMC, mourned the passing of his friend of sixty years. “With Gordon gone, almost all of my first generation semiconductor colleagues are gone,” Chang said.
While they no longer double every other year, transistor counts continue to rise
While transistor counts don’t automatically double every other year, the trend to fit more transistors into integrated circuits continues. In 2019, the iPhone 11 series used the A13 Bionic which contained 8.5 billion transistors. The A14 Bionic inside the iPhone 12 line contained 11.8 billion transistors. That rose to 15 billion transistors for the A15 Bionic employed by the iPhone 13 series, and to 16 billion for the A16 Bionic used by the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max.
