Page 41 - A Practical Guide from Design Planning to Manufacturing

The Evolution of the Microprocessor 17

Figure 1-6 First microprocessor, Intel 4004. (Courtesy: Intel
Corporation.)

semiconductor industry since 1971 have been made possible by steady
year after year improvements in the manufacturing of transistors.

Moore’s Law
Since the creation of the first integrated circuit, the primary driving force
for the entire semiconductor industry has been process scaling. Process
scaling is shrinking the physical size of the transistors and the wires
interconnecting them, allowing more devices to be placed on each chip,
which allows more complex functions to be implemented. In 1975,
Gordon Moore observed that shrinking transistor dimensions were
allowing the number of transistors on a die to double roughly every 18