Technology
What makes it tick
40
BY G. Gilbert
Studio Technology:
It's all good under the hood!!!
Moore's Law and all the wonderful technology that makes the studio industry possible!
It was in 1965, when the transistor was just coming into its own and transistor-based computers, such as the IBM 1401 that utilized punch cards, were becoming accepted as the forefront of technological advances, when then Fairchild Semiconductor Vice President of Research and Development and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made his scientific statement regarding his opinion on the rate of advancement of integrated circuits in the use of devices such as automobile control systems, personal computers and “personal portable communications equipment.” The IC frontier was just opening and everyone was trying to get on the bandwagon. Moore made many prolific predictions, but it is the one now called "Moore's law," developed from an article he wrote for the 35th Anniversary edition of Electronics Magazine that is, just now, proving difficult to move beyond.
Simply put, Moore stated that, every year for the following decade, single chip integrated circuit density would double. Having the specifications from three other IC products and incorporating the data from a fourth that was in production at Fairchild semiconductor at the time, Moore was able to concoct his theory that, based on the figures he had already, capacities for
IC's would continue at a factor of two per year, well into the year 1975 and, according to his calculations, beyond. Moore's Law has been accurate for the past 40 years.
Semiconductors, originally designed at Bell labs in 1945, are created from a material, either germanium or
silicon, that can be both a (Continued on next Page)
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014