Gordon Moore Q&A

By Chris Taylor

In 1965--three years before he co-founded Intel with Bob Noyce--Gordon Moore published an article in Electronics magazine that turned out to be uncannily prophetic. Moore wrote that the number of circuits on a silicon chip would keep doubling every year. He later revised this to every 18 to 24 months, a forecast that has held up remarkably well over several decades and countless product cycles. How will it hold up in the future? TIME's Chris Taylor put the question to the man behind Moore's law.

TIME Are you proud of your prediction?

MOORE I used to cringe when people said "Moore's law," but I've gotten used to it. I was trying to make the point that integrated circuits were the route to faster electronics. I simply saw they were doubling every year and blindly said they would keep doubling. I never expected much accuracy. If Al Gore "invented" the Internet, I "invented" the exponential.

TIME The smaller circuits get, the less likely your law will hold. Right?

MOORE There are real material limits. The fact that chips are made of atoms has increasingly become a problem for us. In the next two or three generations, it may slow down to doubling every five years. People are predicting we will run out of gas in about 2020, and I don't see how we get around that.

TIME There have been some experiments recently that suggest we'll soon be able to make circuits out of single molecules. Might that help?

MOORE I'm a bit of a skeptic on molecular chips. Maybe I'm getting old. It's hard for me to see how those billions of transistors can be interconnected at that level.

TIME So is Silicon Valley going to grind to a halt? Do you fear for the future of Intel?

MOORE There's still room for creativity. Designers are still going to have to think, Well, how do I use my billion-transistor limit? I don't anticipate the end of innovation.

TIME What will we do with our billions of transistors in 2025?

MOORE Computers will become a lot more transparent--you won't recognize you're using one. With advances in speech recognition, you'll be able to walk up, ask a question in English, and it'll dig out an answer. People with little education are going to be able to participate. The digital divide is going to disappear. Electronics systems will start doing what we want rather than the other way around--I hope.