A reminder in Moore's Law

Mobile phones, laptops, netbooks and tablets: You see a new one in each category appear almost every month. Do you remember, on the other hand, back in 2006 when the first iPhone was released? Despite the trend in mobile phones slowly transitioning into the dominant touch screen-enabled smart phone we see today, the rate at which new electronics appeared on the market was far slower than it is today. Here's at least one reason for the increase in pace.


If there's one component present in every single electronic device that can be considered its beating heart, it's the semiconductor, or microchip.
We've reached a point where one could say it's ridiculous, with microchips inhabiting traditionally "dumb" objects from grave-stones and running shoes to fish lures and writing pens. Why are we doing this, you ask? Because it's become economically feasible to do so now. Semiconductors become smaller, faster and even cheaper to produce all the time.

Microchip-powered tombstones allow Timmy to read Grandma's tweets

Moore's Law, named after Intel co-founded Gordon Moore, states that the amount of transistors that can be placed on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. When the Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, the computer regulating its processes had a 2MHz processor. That's about as much as a graphical calculator has today. We've been making quantum leaps in computer processing even before most of you were born, and despite Moore's prediction that this crazy bi-annual increase in computing power would continue for just 10 years, the Law has in fact held to this very day and shows no signs of slowing down until at least 2015.

Trivia: The first semiconductor was created by a man named Jack S. Kilby in 1958, while working for the same company that produced many of your scientific calculators: Texas Instruments