The economic result of Intel's relentless pursuit of Moore's Law is actually more remarkable. The average price of a transistor has fallen by six orders of magnitude due to microprocessor development. It is interesting, therefore, to look into this silicon technology to understand its scope and to be able to predict its future. Intel's microprocessors, and many other integrated circuits, are manufactured using a planar process where a pure silicon wafer is selectively masked and diffused with chemicals to make multiple transistors. This combination is then selectively masked again and metal is deposited on the wafer to interconnect these transistors.
Transistor density is the key price driver of integrated circuits.
Everything gets better and there are no real engineering tradeoffs to make. The results that Intel has achieved in its microprocessor development are shown in Figure 3. Notice how the die from each processor gets progressively smaller with each new silicon process and notice how the next generation processor is then larger with more transistors on it. The market demand for higher performance Intel processors is growing exponentially, so making them smaller also allows us to meet customer demand. There have been dramatic changes in manufacturing to meet today's demand.