What Gordon Moore says about Moore's law. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore crafted a theory more than forty years ago that came to be called Moore's law. It said, in fairly simple terms, that the number of transistors on a circuit would double about every two years. How much longer will it hold true? Moore, who has just received a lifetime achievement award from the Marconi Society at Columbia University, tells us…

"Looking at the technology, I can see about as far into the future as I've ever been able to. The next two or three generations. And in fact, talking to the technologists at Intel, they can probably see four generations today. So, given two to three years per generation, we have at least another decade or so that we ought to be able to continue this rate of advance." Will the pace be slowing down? "Interestingly enough, it's been speeding up recently. The peculiar thing about the semiconductor technology is that by making things smaller, everything gets better. The performance improves, you can lower the power, but most importantly, the cost goes down." What's the biggest change you see coming in the semiconductor industry? "As we make things smaller, we can put a lot more stuff on a chip. It can be both memory and processing power. It will just enable applications that I can't even contemplate at the moment."

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.