Moore's Law gets a stay of execution

Moore's Law will continue to hold true for some time yet as Intel commits itself to a revolutionary circuit-shrinking tool.

There were fears within the industry that product design would be unable to keep pace with the famous law, formulated by Intel's co-founder Gordon Moore.

It states that the number of transistors on a processor, and therefore its power, will double every 18 to 24 months.

But the physical demands of adding more and more transistors to an individual chip have forced the industry's largest players to start investing in future-proofing their revenues.

Intel is part of the EUV LLC consortium, which also counts AMD, IBM, Infineon, Micron Technologies and Motorola as its members. The companies have pooled resources to fund research into Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV).

EUV uses shorter wavelengths than traditional circuit printing machines. This means circuits can be made smaller to meet the demand for shrinking component sizes.

Intel will be the first vendor to get its hands on the tool when its rolls out of the factory in three years' time but it could be another two before the commercial production of EUV chips.