The Legacy and Limits of Moore’s Law

In 1965, Gordon Moore—co-founder of Intel—outlined what would become one of the most enduring observations in the history of technology. His prediction, now known as Moore’s Law, suggested that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double roughly every 18 to 24 months, while costs remained constant. For decades, this empirical rule proved to be remarkably accurate, fueling a period of exponential progress across the semiconductor industry.

From the mid-1960s to the early 2000s, Moore’s Law enabled chipmakers to deliver smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient devices with impressive regularity. However, since around 2005, the trend has slowed. Today, chips are manufactured at sub-5 nm nodes, brushing up against the boundaries of physics, while the cost of research and fabrication has increased exponentially. As a result, Moore’s Law is no longer seen as a law of nature, but rather as a model undergoing structural change.

When Scaling Doesn’t Scale: Industry Challenges

The diminishing returns of transistor miniaturization are particularly visible in sectors where stability, certification, and long product lifecycles are non-negotiable. In industrial applications such as functional safety systems (e.g., airbags or boilers), or in sectors like avionics and food processing equipment, components must undergo long and costly validation cycles. Changing the silicon in such systems often means reinitiating testing and certification efforts that can span years.

Beyond these application-specific constraints, scaling itself has become increasingly problematic. As transistor density grows, power consumption and thermal complexity rise, while maintaining signal integrity at high frequencies becomes more difficult. Verification and validation processes also scale poorly, especially for SoCs with billions of transistors. These limitations have pushed the industry to rethink how progress is defined—and to explore new strategies beyond geometric shrinkage.

The Evolution Beyond Moore

As traditional scaling models reach their limits, the semiconductor industry is embracing alternative innovation paths: 3D stacking, specialized architectures like ASICs and SoCs, and open-source hardware such as RISC-V. Modular strategies, including chiplets, are also gaining ground—enabling designers to split complex systems across optimized dies in a single package, balancing performance, testability, and scalability.

Rather than pursuing universal solutions, designers now tailor architectures to specific application domains, weighing power, performance, and integration against real-world constraints. Progress is no longer driven by raw transistor count but by system-level design and context-aware optimization.

As a side note, it’s also important to recognize that these domains are shaped not just by technological potential, but increasingly by the strategic priorities of major industry players. Companies like Apple, Tesla, and Meta drive innovation by setting new benchmarks—whether redefining performance-per-watt expectations, promoting chiplet-based AI acceleration, or standardizing mature nodes for safety-critical use cases in aerospace or medtech.

Their scale allows them to influence foundry roadmaps and accelerate the adoption of custom silicon that eventually reaches smaller players. Yet this top-down dynamic can also compress product lifecycles (EOL) and amplify supply chain risk, particularly for companies operating in regulated or long-lifecycle sectors. What democratizes access to advanced capabilities can simultaneously increase the pressure to adapt or redesign.

The evolution beyond Moore’s Law is not a collapse—it’s a shift in leverage. Performance is no longer dictated by density alone, but by how well systems are architected, validated, and aligned with real-world use cases. In this new landscape, scale sets the pace—but agility defines survival. For companies without the size to shape the roadmap, competitiveness will depend on smarter design choices, resilient supply chains, and the ability to industrialize innovation across longer, more complex life cycles. The future of progress lies not in chasing the smallest node, but in mastering the trade-offs.

Architectures Built for Scalability: The Role of Chiplets

Among the most impactful of these new approaches is the chiplet architecture. Rather than concentrating all functionality in a monolithic SoC, designers are now decomposing systems into modular dies—each optimized for specific roles—and integrating them at the package level.

This modularity provides significant advantages. It allows validated IP blocks to be reused across multiple products, reduces the risk associated with yield and manufacturing variability, and enables heterogeneous integration. For example, critical analog or safety functions can remain on mature nodes, while compute-intensive parts exploit the latest technologies.

Chiplets also offer benefits in testability and lifecycle management. Systems built with modular elements can be validated incrementally and updated selectively, which aligns well with the needs of industries that demand long-term stability, certification, and design consistency.

In many ways, chiplets represent a pragmatic continuation of Moore’s promise—one that decouples performance growth from strict geometric scaling.

System-Level Modularity and Lifecycle Strategy

While chiplet-based architectures offer modularity at the silicon level, the same principle can be extended to system design—especially in industrial domains where validation cycles are long and product lifespans stretch over decades. In these contexts, lifecycle management becomes a strategic concern. Modularity is not just a matter of performance optimization, but a key enabler of maintainability, upgradability, and supply chain resilience.

Building modular systems helps isolate technological risk, simplify updates, and extend the useful life of certified subsystems. However, designing with modularity in mind requires a deep understanding of both the application domain and the constraints of long-term support.

Designing with modularity in mind, however, requires a coordinated effort between domain expertise and system-level engineering. In many cases, this involves collaboration with design partners who understand both the technical requirements of the application and the long-term constraints of deployment and maintenance. These partnerships are increasingly important in industrial and regulated environments, where maintaining functional and certified modules over extended lifecycles is critical to sustaining product relevance and operational reliability.

Toward Smarter Scaling

The trajectory once defined by Moore’s Law has reached a turning point. While the push for smaller transistors continues at the bleeding edge, real innovation increasingly comes from intelligent design choices—architectures that balance performance, efficiency, modularity, and long-term viability.

For engineering teams working in embedded, industrial, or regulated sectors, the future lies in architectures that are not only fast, but dependable, adaptable, and sustainable. The age of smarter scaling has begun—not in opposition to Moore’s Law, but as its natural evolution.