Though growth rates in some product categories have slowed, doubling of transistors per chip every two years remains a guideline that the industry continues to follow.
The primary yardstick by which the IC industry measures its technological performance and progress remains Moore’s Law that states there is a doubling of the number of transistors per chip every two years. It pertains to the growth rate of components per chip, but it is sometimes generalized to describe the exponential growth in raw computational power achieved with each new generation of ICs.
IC Insights’ 2020 edition of The McClean Report (released in January) shows how over the past five decades, DRAMs, flash memories, microprocessors, and graphics processors have tracked the curve Moore predicted (Figure 1).
Figure 1
