"The future of integrated electronics is the future of electronics itself."

When Intel co-founder Gordon Moore began his now-famous 1965 paper (PDF) "Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits" with his bold proclamation about the future of electronics, few would have believed it—especially given the cost of integrated circuits at the time. And yet, 50 years on, Moore's three-page paper has come to define the computing industry. Its most famous prediction, that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year (later revised down to two years a decade later) has become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the computing industry, a solid goal for the world's semiconductor manufacturers to reach for.

For the most part, it's a goal that's been ably reached. The rapid pace of technological advancement caused by Moore's law has enabled smartphones and tablets to usurp the desktop PC as the consumer's platform of choice, the likes of the PlayStation Vita to put the graphical horsepower of a PlayStation 2 (and sometimes 3) in the palm of your hand, and for AI like IBM's Watson to wipe the floor with some Jeopardy veterans. When Intel released its 8088 CPU back in 1979, the same CPU used in the original IBM PC, it came packed with 29,000 transistors built on a three-micrometer process to reach its 4.77 MHz clock speed. Today, a modern four-core Haswell processor packs in around 1.4 billion transistors built on a 22-nanometer process to reach 3GHz clock speeds.

This process of cramming more transistors onto increasingly smaller areas of silicon (now commonly referred to as Moore's law), not only exponentially increased computing power, but also—just as significantly—made them cheaper and more energy efficient. It's this combination that makes pulling a phone out of your pocket to wirelessly post pictures of your lunch to Twitter, or laugh at a particularly funny picture of someone's cat on Facebook, not only possible, but also cost-effective for the consumer, the device manufacturer, the social network, and everyone in-between.

The evolution of Moore's law in pictures













But how long can Moore's law continue? While Intel's latest 14nm fabs are enabling even more transistors to be crammed onto ever smaller pieces of silicon, there may come a point when the laws of physics put a stop to the process—or at least make it so that it's no longer cost-efficient. The cost of transistors may have fallen below 20 million to the dollar (down from 2.6 million to the dollar in 2002), but with increased research and fabrication costs, even Intel is questioning whether there's an economically viable future beyond the 7nm node. Each and every process-shrink creates new problems that have to be overcome. Recently, FinFETs were introduced to combat power leakage. In the future, it could be 3D packaging (where each die is stacked directly on top of each other) in order to reduce power consumption, and cram more functionality into smaller devices like wearables.

Then there are swathes of new materials lined up to build transistors beyond 7nm. In the near future, III-V semiconductors (which will switch at lower voltages and higher speeds) combined with EUV could be the solution. Beyond that, carbon nanotubes and their high conductivity may do the job; IBM is going to great pains to make carbon nanotubes work, with the company most recently unveiling a carbon nanotube processor. Beyond that, there's plenty of hype for so-called miracle-material graphene, despite its limitations as a semiconductor. Spintronics, which uses the spin of individual electrons as an encoding method for data, has recently managed to extend the size of its technology from nanometers to millimeters by using graphene instead of metal.

That's the thing about Moore's law: no matter how many times it's said to be coming to an end (and that's been a lot of times over the last five decades), a breakthrough technology is always just around the corner to continue it. That ceaseless drive to obey Moore's law has resulted in some of the fastest and finest technological advancements in history. Even if it doesn't result in the fabled singularity, here's hoping that Moore's law, and the wonderful creations that come from it, continue long into the future.