'Law' on faster chips

By Ashley Gross
Bloomberg News Service

SAN FRANCISCO — Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, known for his prediction that computer chips would double in power every two years or so, said he thinks that axiom will hold true for another decade.

"It gets complicated and expensive, but technical solutions seem to be there," Moore told reporters at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco. "There's certainly not an end to creativity in the industry."

Moore's Law, which he originally developed in 1965, has proven true as engineers built ever-smaller semiconductors containing millions of transistors. As chips shrink and ultimately reach atomic sizes, new design and production methods will be needed to propel the $169.3 billion industry, analysts have said.

New production methods for tinier, faster chips include "extreme ultraviolet" lithography to print circuits as the lines become smaller than the wavelength of light, he said.

The rate of innovation will eventually slow, though it won't reach an abrupt end, he said. He didn't predict when that time would come.

"It has to slow down. We're 1 percent of the U.S. economy," Moore said. "How big can you get?"