What is Moore's Law?
Moore's law was written by a developer Gordon Moore in 1965, where he was the director of the Fairchild Semiconductor laboratories (although you know, later he became Founder of Intel). He was the first to see a trend in the early days of microelectronics that would determine the strategy that would be followed by all the manufacturers in the industry in relation to the conspiracy of integrating transistors into integrated circuits.
Earlier, the statement said that «the number of transistors per unit above the combined circuits will double each year«, Or a few years later, in 1975, he changed his law to increase this cadence every two years. Incorrectly, many people believe this time is 18 months because Intel's boss, David House, made such a statement, but it should be remembered that this data is not part of Moore's Law.
Let's put this statement in perspective. Let's say that the top of the integrated circuit is one centimeter (for example). If today, at that distance, 1000 transistors are correct, according to Moore's Law in two years we should be able to integrate 2000 transistors on the same surface, and within four years, we should be able to put 4000 transistors, and so on doubling that amount every two years
To put it into perspective, this wonderful video created by DataGrapha shows us how Moore's Law has been growing from his statement to today, and how the introduction of processors has come about. In many cases the rule was inconsistent, and in some cases the emergence of technology has even allowed it to be overcome.
Why is it so important for hardware?
Logically, for this to happen is necessary reducing the size of transistors because, if not, we couldn't double the value when there was no space to do so because, remember, the law maintains that the surface is always the same (although in fact, it has to do with the density of transistors in each unit area).
And for that reason lithography
The manufacturing or lithography process is measured in nanometers (setting you how small, 10 nanometers-7 inches, or anything similar, 0.0000001 inches), and more accurately size of transistors. Therefore, a 14 nm process means that each transistor measures 14 x 10-7 inches, or 0.0000014 cm.
This means that, in comparison, double transistors can be placed in the 7 nm process as a 14 nm process at the same location. Being able to place a very large number of transistors in the same location has an impact on the performance and power consumption, so having a small lithograph means that the processor will be powerful and efficient.
