years his law has proven to be extremely accurate: between 1971 and 2001, the
number of transistors on a chip doubled every 1. 96 years.
Moore's taw may continue to be true for at least another decade, but at
(3)-
some point chips will get faster more slowly. Even now, the improvement of
chips faces two serious technical problems. Firstly, the more densely
transistors are packed onto chips the hotter they get. Intel's chips will soon
reach the energy density of a nuclear reactor and most people do not want to
have a small nuclear reactor on their desk at home or in the office. At the
moment this simply means that modern laptops can get very hot, but in the
future these devices could become dangerous. A second and more serious
threat to Moore's Law comes from the manufacturing process. Circuit
patterns are printed onto silicon chips by shining focused light onto them. If