This Machine Could Keep Moore’s Law on Track

Over the last half-century, we’ve come to think of Moore’s Law—the roughly biennial doubling of the number of transistors in a given area of silicon, the gains that drive computing forward—as something that just happens, as though it were a natural, inevitable process, akin to evolution or aging. The reality, of course, is much different. Keeping pace with Moore’s Law requires almost unimaginable expenditures of time, energy, and human ingenuity—thousands of people on multiple continents and endless acres of some of the most complex machinery on the planet.