Enforcing Moore's Law

Looking back at the history of semiconductor process technology, it's easy to see why people have become complacent about the pace of progress. Every two years or so, there is a new technology generation that doubles the number of transistors on a chip of constant size; while making smaller advances along the way, everything stays roughly on the Moore's Law curve. Until the early 1990s, computers were built out of integrated circuits made with bipolar transistors. These bipolar ICs consumed power whether they were operating or not. As complexity increased along the Moore's Law curve, bipolar technology's power consumption began to get out of hand. CMOS logic was developed to solve this problem. With each new generation of CMOS process technology, leakage became less of a problem. Today, leakage is getting out of hand.