On the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry doesn’t seem as sexy as it did all those years ago. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, easily beats Gordon Moore, the Intel chairman emeritus and cofounder who first observed Moore’s Law on a Google Trends comparison. The baton of Silicon Valley has passed from the tech celebrity of the past to the Wunderkind of today.
Semiconductor chips are built from transistors, the on-off switches that are the foundation of the ones and zeroes of digital computing. All electronics use chips with these transistors, and networks like Facebook wouldn’t be possible without them. And thanks to Moore’s Law — the observation that the number of transistors doubles on a chip every couple of years —we have Internet trolls, whom I (facetiously) refer to as the nexus of human evolution.
As part of its “It all starts here” marketing campaign, the U.S. semiconductor industry wants people to understand that the whole electronics industry — and things like Taylor Swift’s new 3D viewing app or your Candy Crush Saga mobile game — wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the underlying technology of chips.
The Semiconductor Industry Association, the trade group for U.S. chip makers, revealed the slogan and initiative on Thursday night. The group unveiled the campaign at its annual dinner at the Fairmont Hotel before a crowd of 500 believers. It’s a smart campaign, though it reminds me a little of when Al Gore said he invented the Internet. But in this case, it happens to be true.
More than 64 billion chips were sold in the U.S. in 2013, or 200 chips for every American, according to the SIA. Without the $33 billion reinvested by chip companies in research and development in 2013, we wouldn’t have a lot of things. We wouldn’t have computers and networking infrastructure. We wouldn’t have the Internet as it is now. We wouldn’t have Twitter— or the Internet trolls on Twitter. And, worst of all, we wouldn’t have all those lovely cat videos on YouTube.
John Kelly, keynote speaker at the SIA dinner and senior vice president and director of research at IBM, doesn’t believe the chip industry, or, by extension, hardware, is passé.
“I believe the future of this industry is even brighter than we’ve seen in the past,” he said. “We are seeing an explosion of devices, and more importantly, an explosion in data. At IBM, we call data the next natural resource.”
By 2020, we will have generated 40 zettabytes of data. A zettabyte is 10 with 23 zeroes after it.
“That’s a magical number because it is the number of stars in the universe,” Kelly said. “So man has literally created a digital universe.”
We’ll have 10 billion mobile devices created by 2016, or more than the number of people on the planet, Kelly said. The U.S. manufacturing sector stores 2,000 exabytes of data. Every human being will generate a petabyte of healthcare data over the course of our lives, he said.
In the third quarter, U.S. chip sales were $87 billion, the highest in industry history and up eight percent from a year ago. The chip industry’s advances may not look like much percentage-wise, but in terms of impact, such growth adds up to enormous changes for society.
“The technologies from the semiconductor industry will underpin the advances in society,” said Kelly.
Moore’s Law gives us continuous technological advance, allowing the chip industry to be the bellwether for the U.S. economy. The SIA said the U.S. semiconductor industry has contributed more to the economy than any other major manufacturing industry in the last 25 years. It has accounted for 30 percent of all productivity gains due to innovation in the U.S. economy between 1960 and 2007, the SIA said.
Over 250,000 people are directly employed in the chip business, with another 1 million indirectly employed. The average salary chip worker salary is 2.5 times that of the average U.S. worker, U.S. chip makers have the majority of the global market share of the worldwide chip business, and chips are the number 3 U.S. export.
If Moore’s Law were applied to the auto industry, a typical family sedan car from 20 years ago would today have the same horsepower as a large passenger jet engine.
And if Moore’s Law were applied to lightbulbs, a 60-watt incandescent bulb from 20 years ago would today contain enough wattage to light a high school stadium.
If we had a Moore’s Law for energy efficiency to go with the Moore’s Law for chips, so that the amount of energy used by all those chips started to go down over time, then we would really be cooking.
If Moore’s Law ever ends, Kelly said, we’ll move on to new kinds of designs for future progress. Those include synaptic devices, or those that mimic the functions of the human brain.
“They are extremely powerful and operate at extremely low power,” he said. “These devices will transform the world.”
Because, you know, the semiconductor industry just hasn’t done enough for us yet.
