The slowing of Moore’s law has prompted many to ask, “Is Moore’s law finally ending? This, in fact, is not occurring. While Moore’s law is still delivering exponential improvements, the results are being delivered at a slower pace. The pace of technology innovation is NOT slowing down, however. Rather, the explosion of hyperconnectivity, big data, and artificial intelligence applications has increased the pace of innovation and the need for “Moore’s law-style” improvements in delivered technology.
For many years, scale complexity drove Moore’s law and the semiconductor industry’s exponential technology growth. As the ability to scale a single chip slows, the industry is finding other methods of innovation to maintain exponential growth.
This new design trend is driven by systemic complexity. Some aspects of this new approach to design have been dubbed “more than Moore.” This term refers primarily to 2.5D and 3D integration techniques.
The complete landscape is far bigger and presents the opportunity for higher impact, however. At the 2021 SNUG World conference of worldwide Synopsys Users Group members, the chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, Aart de Geus, presented a keynote address. In his presentation, de Geus observed that Moore’s law is now blending with new innovations that leverage systemic complexity. He coined the term SysMoore as a shorthand way to describe this new design paradigm.
These trends and resultant terminology are summarized below. The SysMoore era will fuel semiconductor innovation for the foreseeable future. With it comes a wide range of design challenges that must be addressed.