The Chip Insider®– Gordon Moore Tribute - SPIE ALP

Summary:

Gordon Moore Tribute - SPIE ALP 2024: Gordon's most generous gift has been to inspire us. Like in The Wizard of Oz, we were told to follow a yellow brick road -- ours paved with gold. It's a road where the wicked witch of fizzled-out technology -- like x-ray and 157nm -- lurk to stop us. And there were plenty of unknowns. We would have been stopped dead in our tracks had we not broken through Robert Doering's Red Brick Walls on the roadmap.

In the movie, when the Wizard screams, "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," it's almost a mirror to Gordon's vocal humility about his law. Gordon always believed it was not him, but us that moves it forward. He knew our curiosity is Glinda from the tale telling us we'll always have the power to move forward.

So what is Moore's Law ... REALLY? Is it just "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," as Gordon's first paper was titled? Is it shrinkonomics, where the areal costs are offset by density gains? It's been all those.

But don’t be afraid of them ending. Because far more importantly it's about us and the inexhaustible ability of humans to innovate.

Carver Mead – who coined the term – said... “Moore’s Law ... is really about people’s belief in the future and their willingness to put energy into causing that thing to come about."

Moore’s Law has both a demand and supply side that runs on curiosity. The demand side comes from humans always thinking of something more to do with more transistors. The supply side comes from humans thinking of how to cram more transistors into a package.

As we move forward without Gordon, I think he is still telling us to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." That we have to work it out for ourselves. We'll always have the power to move forward if we let our curiosity lead the way. But we must believe in ourselves and work together.

When Gordon retired, he tried to convince me he had just been lucky. I reminded him of his love of fishing and challenged him about the two ingredients of a successful fishing trip: luck and knowing where the fish are. He laughed, agreeing that he always had a sense of where the fish were. Indeed, he was a master of fishing near the best intersections of technology and business. Then he was patient to wait until luck played its role.

Asking him what he wanted to do next, he said he wanted to come back in a hundred years to see how it all turns out.

As you go forward from today, take this as a challenge. Learn from Gordon. He said, “Moore's Law is not a law. It's an opportunity." "Failure is an option. If everything you try works you aren't trying hard enough." Fish where the fish are. And, stick to first principles.

“Moore's Law is not a law. It's an opportunity” – Gordon Moore

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