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8 The PCB Design Magazine • April 2015 by Andy Shaughnessy i-CoNNeCT007 THE SHAUGHNESSy REPoRT Moore's Law Turns 50 column Let's all pause to wish Moore's Law a very happy 50 th birthday, even as the vultures begin to circle overhead. Fifty years ago, Dr. Moore was director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, and Electron- ics Magazine asked him to make some predic- tions about the future of the semiconductor industry. On April 19, 1965, the magazine pub- lished his earthshaking article outlining what became known as Moore's Law. In the article, titled "Cramming More Com- ponents onto Integrated Circuits," Moore pos- ited that the number of components in a dense integrated circuit had doubled every year, and would continue at that rate for at least 10 years. Before he knew it, electronics companies around the globe were using Moore's Law for their tech- nology roadmaps. It has become more than a tar- get; it is one of the predominant driving forces in the electronics industry. In 1975, Moore amend- ed his prediction from one year to approximate- ly every two years. (Interestingly, Moore didn't come up with the term Moore's Law; that honor belongs to Caltech's Carver Mead.) Moore went on to be a co-founder and CEO of Intel Corporation. He's had a great life; he and his wife created the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with a $5 billion endow- ment. In 2001, the couple donated $600 mil- lion to Caltech, the biggest single gift ever given to a college, and in 2007 they gave $200 million to Caltech and the University of California to fund the Thirty Meter Telescope, to be built on Mauna Kae in Hawaii. But all this time, Moore knew his law would hit a manufacturing wall. He once said, "It can't