The Passing of an Era

Much has been written about the impending demise of Moore’s Law, the exponential scaling of transistor density on integrated circuit (IC) chips. When pondering the consequences of this upcoming shift, it is appropriate to take a moment to note the passing of Andrew Grove on March 21, 2016 at the age of 79. Grove was the CEO of Intel Corporation from 1987 to 1998, following Gordon Moore, and was then its Chair until 2005. As much as anyone, Grove was responsible for transforming Moore’s Law and the information revolution into realities. Andy Grove had a remarkable—many would say astonishing— personal story. Escaping the World War II Holocaust and the political upheaval in Hungary 11 years later, he fled to the United States as a penniless immigrant, unable to speak English and suffering from disastrous hearing loss due to a childhood illness. He managed to graduate from the City College of New York and move on to the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned a PhD in chemical engineering in 1963. He joined Fairchild Semiconductor shortly thereafter and helped to found Intel in 1968. Grove was clearly a formidable technical talent, but he was better known for his approach to management, which he described in a 1996 book titled Only the Paranoid Survive [1]. His approach was intense personal confrontation, which, on the receiving end, was like being hit on the head with a board, according to his successor as CEO, Craig Barrett. Any number of management consultants/psychologists would probably say that this approach was excessive, but it helped to bring Intel back from the brink of more than one disaster and make it one of the most successful companies in history, as the dominant supplier of microprocessor chips to the computer industry. Being successful did not always equate with being right. When a new Pentium microprocessor was introduced in 1994, some users noticed that it had a processing flaw, which Grove dismissed as unimportant to all but the most sophisticated users, thinking that low-end users would not be concerned. Instead, there was a firestorm of user complaints and he and Intel had to backtrack and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to correct the flaw. As suggested in a New York Times story on his passing by Jonathan Kandell [2], however, this situation amounted to snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. The Pentium computing engines, which had previously been buried in brand-name computers, were such a continuously prominent item in the press during the long repair saga that they became as well-known a brand as the computers that contained them. By any measure, fantastically dense and capable ICs have had a dominant role in creating the technology landscape we sometimes take for granted today. From the early days when computer companies (largely unsuccessfully) tried to convince housewives that they should buy home computers to store their food recipes, to the first irresistible “App” of email, and on to the components of the World Wide Web, smartphones, and embedded processors, amazing advances occurred as Moore’s Law was doggedly pursued and ICs progressed. For these advances, we can thank people such as Andy Grove. Grove’s approach to business, typified by his “Only the Paranoid Survive” mantra, was to be constantly worried that a new technology and/or new business approach would suddenly arrive to destroy what had seemed an invincible business. Trying to anticipate and get ahead of such events was his daily challenge. For today’s semiconductor companies, this challenge is intense, to say the least. The “business as usual” model of following Moore’s Law to its end is about to end. Moore’s Law is likely to reach its physical and/or practical manufacturing limit within the next decade or so, and semiconductor companies must consider how to reinvent themselves. Moore’s Law was articulated by Gordon Moore in 1965 and modified slightly in 1970 to postulate that the power of IC chips would double and their price drop by half about every two years, obsoleting earlier generations of chips. This created a virtuous cycle, as every time switch size scaled down, chip performance would automatically improve. However, when 90 nm chips were first achieved in the early 2000s, removing the heat created during operation became a major problem. Clock speed, the rate at which computations are executed, was capped and microprocessors were constructed with multiple cores (e.g., 2, 4, 8...), with the idea being that four cores operating at 250 MHz were as fast as one core operating at 1 GHz, provided that a problem could be executed in parallel parts. Although these measures allowed chip dimensions to continue to scale, heat remains a limiting problem. Research plans for scaling to 5 nm chips, which are projected for 2020–2021, have already been postulated. However, further reduction to the probable physical limit of 2–3 nm will require heroic effort, if it is achieved at all. Key components of IC technology and the challenges of advancing Moore’s Law much further were well described recently in Nature by M. Mitchell Waldrop [3].