Moore’s Law predicted the technological advances that we are experiencing today, and bandwidth is helping to propel those advances forward, specifically for IIoT. Panduit’s white paper, “The Ubiquity of Bandwidth,” explains how Moore’s Law factors into IIoT network capabilities.
Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore is best remembered as a co-founder of Intel. But while he was the director of Research & Development at his previous employer, Fairchild Semiconductor, he authored a paper in 1965 titled, Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits. In the article, Moore predicted that the number of transistors contained within a semiconductor will double approximately every two years.
Moore’s Law is applicable along three axes:
Cost – The cost for many transistors drops by almost half with every reduction in the size of the transistors.
Performance – Processor speeds increase because the smaller the transistor, the faster it can operate. Additionally, the transistors become closer to each other which reduces the latency between them.
Complexity – For a given size, the number of transistors doubles with the reduction in feature size. This allows more complex implementations and circuitry.
Although all three aspects of Moore’s Law are important, it is the ability to implement ever-increasing complexity that might be the most important.
For example, if a smartphone was built using the semiconductor technology available in 1971, the phone’s microprocessor would be the size of a parking space. In fact, the communication theories needed for ubiquitous bandwidth evolved in the late 1940s and 1950s.
They could not have been implemented at that time, however, because it would have been impractical to build with vacuum tubes or discrete transistors.
IIoT Technology
IoT has captured product developers’ imagination. In the consumer space, it remains to be seen what applications will take hold, but wearables seem a certainty.
It is a similar situation on the factory floor as numerous deployment scenarios exist, but we will need some history for us to see which ones provide a suitable ROI.
Tracking packages, monitoring, and alerting applications are one thing. Implementing advanced analytics and complicated algorithms to extract meaning from IIoT data that has been gathered is something else.
None of this would happen without the ubiquity of bandwidth.
To learn more about bandwidth and why it’s essential for your IIoT network’s infrastructure, download Panduit’s “The Ubiquity of Bandwidth” white paper – or subscribe to our blog to access our IoT “101” white paper series.
Julio Franco, (2015, April 20). “50 Years of Moore’s Law: Fun facts, a Timeline Infographic and Gordon’s Own Thoughts 5 Decades Later.” Techspot. [Online]. Available: https://www.techspot.com/news/60418-50-years-moore-law-fun-facts-timeline-infographic.html.
Gordon Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, volume 38, no. 8, 1965.
M. Patel, et. al. (2017, May 19) “What’s New with the Internet of Things?” McKinsey & Company. [Online]. Available: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/semiconductors/our-insights/whats-new-with-the-internet-of-things.
