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Moore’s Law Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, pp. 114–117, April 19, 1965.
Moore’s Law
Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, pp. 114–117, April 19, 1965.
Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits
• A manifesto about the promise of integrations
• Gordon Moore predicts a huge range of applications
• And a bunch of advantages
• He’s selling hard!
The promise
• Apps -- scientific advancement, home computers, automatic auto control, cell phones, electronic wrist watches, large scale data processing, and communication networks.
The Promise
• Reliability
• Compactness
• Weight
• Power efficiency
• Simpler designs -- see 8008 to 8086 evolution
Moore’s Law
• The number of minimum cost xtrs per die increases exponentially
• Density decreases cost
• Yield problems increases cost
Moore’s Law
• xtrs count double s every year.
• Not quite right
• Moore’s law: 250 xtrs in 2009
• Reality: 232
• Probably fewer “cheapest”
year xtrs1962 101965 501970 10001975 65,000
How it played out
Moore’s Law
• Since 1975
• 1,100 x decrease in feature size
• 1.2M x increase in density
• About 45% per year. Doubling every 22 months.
Observations
• Other components (caps, inductors) will be elusive.
• Constant power scaling (formalized by Dennard)
• Chip size is roughly constant
• Moore says 1/4 sq. in. = 161mm2
Observations
• Very optimistic about reliability.
• Electron beam lithography (this is still just a few years away)
• Multiple metal layers!!!
• Other technologies
• attaching active components to “thin film arrays”
Corollaries to Moore’s Law
• Moore’s law performance scaling
• Switching speed goes up with decreasing feature sizes -- Moore doesn’t comment on this.
• We have leveraged density + switching speed to increase performance roughly with Moore’s law.
Performance Growth
Performance grows faster than Moore’s law (45%/year)An In-Depth Look at Computer Performance Growth, Magnus Ekman, Fredrik Warg, and Jim Nilsson, CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, Department of Computer Engineering technical report 2004-9, 2004.
Beating Moore
An In-Depth Look at Computer Performance Growth, Magnus Ekman, Fredrik Warg, and Jim Nilsson, CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, Department of Computer Engineering technical report 2004-9, 2004.
In Context
• It’s hard to overestimate the importance of the impact of Moore’s law.
• However...
• Note that it’s not about performance.
• It’s strictly about density.
• Not that this stops anyone from abusing it.
• A pretty compelling vision for what integrated circuit could do.
More on Scaling
• Seminal paper on scaling is Dennard et. al. “Design of ion-implanted MOSFET's with very small physical dimensions”, 1974
• Lays out how to truly scalable transistors.
Dennardian Scaling
• Given a scaling factor k.
Substrate
L
Gatetox Oxide
W
drain sink
Dennardian Breakdown
0
500
1000
1500
2000
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
rela
tive
leak
age
Vt
1
1.5
2
2.5
3
3.5
4
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Ener
gy *
Dela
y @
Vt =
300
mV
Vdd/Vt
• The problem with leakage
Dennardian Breakdown
Dennardian Breakdown
