I tried to illustrate this number, ten to the eighteenth, and I've used raindrops falling on California.Į.O. We had more electronics built in a year than existed in the beginning of that year when we started out. And that in a significant period where it actually doubled every year.
Now, that's a growth industry, maintaining an average growth of about 80 percent per year over this whole time period. And this has grown eight and a half orders of magnitude over that period. This is the number of transistors shipped per year as near as I can estimate it over the same period. The exponentials tend to kind of distort things that are more clearly experienced linearly when you're actually there.īut while this is phenomenal growth, if you want to see the real underlying growth of the industry, look at the output. But I look back here and realize that in 1974 and again in 1984, '85 Intel had to get rid of a third of its work force. This one perhaps is a little more severe than the rest. The dips and bumps on this exponential curve may not look so severe. A compound annual growth of some 14 percent, even with the flattening of the last few years. It's grown 80 fold over this 35-year period I've depicted here. The first thing I want to look at is the growth of revenues in the industry. What I want to do today is look at some of these exponentials and maybe give some idea where they might go and talk a little bit about how we're going to deal with the looming catastrophes that people seem to be projecting as they look further down the road. There's always some kind of catastrophe if you project it far enough into the future. But no physical quantity can continue to change exponentially forever. Well, many of the parameters related to the semiconductor and solid-state circuits industry have shown exponential dependences over the years. I'm not quite so sure San Francisco is that easy to sell these days. And Philadelphia in February, it was easy to convince your spouse it was really hard work you weren't going on a boondoggle. At that time, they were all in Philadelphia. And even then, I didn't go to solid-state circuits conferences.Ĭhemists didn't know an awful lot about circuits, but when chemists started making circuits in the early '60s, I did attend several of the conferences. In fact, I didn't get in the semiconductor industry, as you just heard, until 1956. This conference has grown a bit over the years. International Solid-State Circuits ConferenceĪNNOUNCER: Please join me in welcoming Dr. Gordon Moore Keynote - International Solid-State Circuits Conference
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