TSMC Blog - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited

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It has been nearly 3 months since I joined TSMC. As with anyone joining a new company, I have been drinking from a firehose of information and data. One of the key topics that I first dug into was Moore's Law, which simplified states: The number of transistors in an integrated device or chip doubles about every 2 years.Moore's Law is actually misnamed as a law as it more accurate to describe it as a guideline of historical observation and future prediction of the number of transistors in a semiconductor device or chip. These observations and predictions have largely held true for the past several decades. As we approach a new decade, some appear to share an opinion that Moore's Law is dead.It would appear that some have conflated Moore's Law to mean that the performance of a chip, given the same area, doubles every 2 years. For many years, particularly in the development of CPUs and GPUs, this appeared to hold true. From the 1970s to early 2000's, there was an explosive increase of tr…