Supply Chain News: Moore's Law and the Supply Chain

Think It's Almost Over? Think Again

An important anniversary in the annals of technology occurred last week. On April 19, 1965 a young Gordon Moore first graphed the progress of technology improvement that would come to bear his name.

SCDigest Says:

Moore's Law is powering the amazing rise of robots of all sorts in our supply chains - a development SCDigest believes most readers would agree is sure to expand. What Do You Say? Click Here to Send Us Your Comments Click Here to See Reader Feedback

Moore observed 50 years ago that the performance (speed, price, size) of microchips regularly doubled every 18 months. Moore was working at chip maker Fairchild Semiconductor, still going strong all these years later, but of course he would later go on to co-found chip giant Intel.
Moore's initial plot later showed up in an article he wrote for Electronics magazine. And though he was not the only one at the time to make the same basic observation, a decade or so later the idea became known as "Moore's Law," perhaps the most famous concept in tech industry history.
In the image of the initial plot nearby, the progress looks like a nearly straight diagonal line. But that is because it is plotted as a logarithmic function. If it was plotted more conventionally, it would show what today would like slow progress in early years, and then explode upward in terms of processing power.
Many over the years have predicted the end of Moore's Law, as chip technology would eventually hit a wall. And indeed, the pace of progress in recent years has slowed by about half, meaning performance is improving roughly 50% every 18 months - still a pretty rapid pace.
Just as importantly, Moore's Law is being applied to other areas besides chip technology - basically anything "digital" or digital-like - from 3D printing to mapping the human genome.
SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore wrote the following in 2013, after hearing a presentation by famed technology inventory Ray Kurzweil after he gave a keynote presentation at the JDA Software user conference that year:

"Digital genius and inventor Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote presentation on what the real ramifications are for the never-ending exponential growth of information-based technologies. When the project to map the human genome was only 1% complete in 7 years, for example, "linear" thinkers fretted about the slow pace. Kurzweil instead said "Great, we're almost done." Sure enough, the whole project was complete another 7 years later (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.)," Gilmore wrote.

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He added: "Kurzweil says "3D digital printing for physical items will explode over the next decade - and that I know will deliver huge threats and opportunities for companies and their supply chains. Companies must pay attention to this starting immediately."
In addition to 3D printing, Moore's Law is driving many other areas that impact the supply chain. For example, chip advances are now allowing supply chain software companies to solve complex problems (e.g., forecasting every SKU at every retail store) that simply took too long to compute in the past.

The same level of new computing power will enable a new generation of "always on" or real-time planning environments.

And Moore's Law is powering the amazing rise of robots of all sorts in our supply chains - a development SCDigest believes most readers would agree is sure to expand. While there certainly have been advances in the physical capabilities and dexterity of these robots, the real progress is being made in data processing power and the real-time controls of these machines.

We are early in the robotic game - with the technology following Moore's Law, we can expect some mind-boggling advances in coming years.

Drones, Cloud computing, RFID, mobility, "Big Data" - these are just a few of the other supply chain-related areas impacted by Moore's Law.

Last week, Wall Street Journal writer Michael Malone says that "If some of the recent breakthroughs in atomic-level transistors, nanotechnology and biological computers prove fruitful, Moore's Law could again accelerate, or at least continue to rule, for decades to come. It now seems more likely than ever that a thousand years from now, what will be remembered most about our time will be its stunning efflorescence of innovation and entrepreneurship. By then Moore's Law will have become Moore's Era."

Fifty years later, Moore's Law is going strong - it has a will continue to revolutionize our lives and our supply chains.