Euro spintronics gives a different shape to Moore's Law

A rather fuzzy European Commission press release lauds the successful conclusion of a joint venture into integrating magnetic gates into CMOS. No figures, alas, so no way of judging the practicalities of what they developed, and the chosen application they discuss - reprogrammable logic chips - has plenty of challenges of its own before you start to compete on basic physics.

But that's not the best bit of the press release. In paragraph two, they warm up the audience with some boilerplate technojoy. With one small innovation...

"In the 1960s, Henry Moore observed that it took around 18 months for silicon chip manufacturers to shrink their technology and fit twice as many transistors into the same area of silicon."

Henry Moore is famous for many things, including being the leading abstract sculptor of the 20th century and producing wobbly shapes so monumental that they're now being stolen for the sheer value of their bronze. But I don't know whether his observations preceded those by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, whose 1965 paper is normally thought to have spawned the eponymous law.