The Pinkerton Lecture - The Relentless March of the Microchip

The first 60 years of computing have seen spectacular progress in the technology, driven for the last 40 years by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool. Ever-shrinking transistor dimensions have yielded increasingly complex and cost-effective microchips, a win-win scenario that has driven the explosion in the use of digital electronics and enabled computers to be embedded into a vast range of high-volume products.