Semiconductor History | San Francisco Marriott, February 2002 — A Second Law, and the Year It Stopped Being True

In February 2002, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, Samsung's memory chief told the industry that the rule it had been living by was too slow. 황창규 argued that memory density was doubling every twelve months rather than every two years, and that the demand behind it would come from phones and digital consumer gear, with PCs no longer setting the pace. Korean papers named it 황의 법칙, Hwang's Law, and Samsung set about proving it with a product calendar. A 256-megabit NAND flash part in 1999, then 512Mb, 1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb, 8Gb, 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb in 2007. Eight doublings, one a year, each with an announcement attached. Moore's own figures were more careful. His 1965 article projected components per chip at minimum cost doubling annually, he revised that to every two years in 1975, and the eighteen-month version everyone quotes was never his. What separates the two is the kind of statement each one is. Moore described something he had observed; the Samsung version was a schedule, and a company can keep an annual doubling true for a while by deciding to announce one every year. In 2008 there was no 128-gigabit part. On 15 February 2010 Samsung told reporters it was dropping the practice of announcing a development each year, and would announce only products carried through to mass production. OhmyNews noted that Hynix had announced a 20-nanometre 64Gb NAND of its own six days before. 황창규 had left the company in 2009. He led the work on Samsung's 256-megabit DRAM in 1994, which Korean accounts credit as the world's first, and he went on to chair KT. This is one of the few industry laws with an address. ISSCC has met every February at this hotel since 1990, and it still does. The Marriott Marquis opened in 1989 at 780 Mission Street, and the Yerba Buena Gardens side of it, where the photograph was taken, is open ground anyone can stand on. Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.