Gordon Moore's Legacy

In March, Gordon Moore, the semiconductor industry, spent his entire life at home. Is gone, but Moore's legacy to the semiconductor industry will continue to lead the way in the future.

 Semiconductor circuit design and engineering

 In Moore's era, semiconductor processes, devices and circuit design were still in the nascent stage, when the concept of large-scale integrated circuits had not yet emerged. At the time, the leaders of the semiconductor industry usually had an academic research background, which led to two problems of thinking.

 First is the research thinking is greater than the engineering thinking, such as the pioneer in the field of semiconductor shockley is a generation of academia, because of the achievements in the field of semiconductor physics and won the Nobel Prize, but he as the head of shockley semiconductor laboratory operating company, its research thinking greatly limits the development of the company, this is also Moore decided to leave shockley laboratory and join fairchild semiconductor.

 In addition to the lack of engineering thinking, another problem is how to design semiconductor devices and circuit. Semiconductor devices and circuit design were two very different fields at that time, so the talents in the semiconductor field were often independent at that time, but how to combine semiconductor devices and circuit design was not known. At Fairchild, Moore realized the problem, and this thinking eventually led Moore to create a whole new path when he founded Intel.

 After Moore left Fairchild to create Intel, Moore decided to address both problems. In order to ensure that the engineering thinking can have due position in the company, and people in the field of different background together to solve the problem, Moore in Intel requires all researchers are directly involved in chip production process, so that scientific theory and engineering practice can very well together, and make circuit design and semiconductor device process also closely, eventually made Intel across era IDM giant status.

We believe that Moore is one of the semiconductor from academia to the real industrialization. His emphasis on system engineering thinking, especially the combination of circuit and process design, is not out of date today. In the increasingly limited stage of semiconductor process performance improvement, the further improvement of chip performance must rely on system engineering, which requires the collaborative optimization of algorithms, circuits, processes and devices.

 Moore's Law and an exponential development

 Perhaps Moore's most important legacy is simply Moore's Law. In 1965, Moore made the famous prediction known as "Moore's Law" that the number of transistors on chips would double every year in the future. In 1975, Moore revised the time for doubling the transistors to two years. But whether in one year or two, Moore's Law reveals the law of the rapid exponential development of new technologies.

 Today, although the rise in chip integration is slowing as the shrinkage of semiconductor process nodes becomes more and more challenged by physical limits, from another perspective, Moore's Law on the development of new technology index is playing in other areas of the chip industry. In the era when Moore just put forward Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry was at the starting point of take-off. In terms of technology, the relevant accumulation has been mature and developed rapidly. In terms of the market, the demand of various electronic products also made the semiconductor industry market large enough to meet the development of the index law.

 Today, the exponential development law of Moore's Law still applies to some chip markets. A typical example is the artificial intelligence-related chips. This round of the development of artificial intelligence since 2015, if we compare the semiconductor industry in the 60s, we can also see the related technology of artificial intelligence after years of accumulation in 2015 has been in the starting point of the outbreak, and from the perspective of market natural language processing, machine vision and recommended system has a strong demand for artificial intelligence. As a result, we have seen an exponential development of AI chip performance over the past decade or so. For example, the AI computing power of GPU chips has basically doubled its performance every two years in the past decade, which is also an important sign that AI is becoming the most critical new market in the semiconductor industry.

We believe that the law of Moore's Law exponential development will remain effective in the future emerging chip market. For semiconductor people, devoting themselves to these emerging fields is expected to stand on the express train of index development. Of course, on the other hand, related companies must also realize that the law of index development is the motivation and pressure, because they must be able to catch up with the law of peer index development in the market to become a strong competitor.

 Moore's road map and the post-Moore era

 When Moore described the chip transistor every two years, doubling its integration, he might just want to predict and develop as an industry. But as the semiconductor industry develops and is inseparable from the market, the semiconductor industry has found that if it needs to maintain the entire industry's momentum and market growth, it must maintain the exponential growth described in Moore's Law. At this point, Moore's Law is not just a prediction of the future, but also a roadmap for the future development of the semiconductor industry.

 This can also explain why the semiconductor process node characteristic size miniature although since 15 years ago met the challenge of physical limit, but the semiconductor industry still at all costs to semiconductor process node characteristic size continue to shrink, because only in this way to ensure that the semiconductor industry does not fall into the trap of the sunset industry. To this day, Moore's Law remains a strong roadmap for the semiconductor industry, because the industry keeps coming up with new technology solutions. For example, the IMEC released last year in the semiconductor process roadmap, the transistor feature size will remain in the next decade every two years integration doubled (i. e., transistor feature size decreased to 0.7 times every two years) rule continue to shrink, by 2036 transistor feature size is expected to reach 0.2nm, visible transistor features described in Moore's law size can still remain for a long time.

 But the post-Moorish era is still inevitable. The main reason is that as the transistor feature size gets closer to the physical limit, the further transistor feature size is not necessarily the most reasonable route, especially when there are other methods other than the transistor feature size reduction that can further improve the integration and performance of the chip. If we call the era of the semiconductor chip industry with other technology paths than the post-Moore era, the most critical technology in the post-Moore era is advanced packaging and system-level design.

 Advanced packaging technology provides a brand-new design idea for the chip system. Using advanced packaging technologies such as chiplet, we can split large design chips into multiple small chiplet's and package them together. Using chiplet can greatly increase the flexibility of design (a variety of different chiplet can be combined into different products), reduce costs (after using chiplet, because the area of each chiplet smaller, so the overall yield greatly increased), improve performance (chiplet and advanced packaging technology can provide high bandwidth to meet the needs of data interconnection), the future is expected to become the main technical driving force after Moore era. Therefore, the use of advanced packaging to further improve the integration in a more reasonable way with both economy and performance is expected to become the mainstream in the post-Moore era.

Another key post-Moore idea is system-level design. In the era of Moore's Law, semiconductor process node shrinkage was the mainstream driving force for chip performance improvement. In a classic case, a company that spent a lot of time on CPU processor architecture design had less chip performance than Intel's traditional architecture but the next generation of semiconductor process. But in the Moore era, there will no longer be a single dominant technology driving force, but chip performance improvement must be considered from the system level, the system level includes the application algorithm, packaging, circuit, semiconductor devices and technology, etc., must consider all these factors, to achieve sustainable progress for a long time.