Is Moore’s Law coming to an end? In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that “the number of components that could be etched onto the surface of a silicon wafer was doubling at regular intervals and would do so for the foreseeable future.” This principle has guided the tech industry ever since, taking it as an article of faith that engineers will find a way to continuously make tech smaller, faster, and cheaper. A global alliance of chip makers, including industry associations from the US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, will make one final report based on a chip technology forecasting system called the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers plans to announce on Wednesday that it will a create a new forecasting system, called the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems. The decision to back away from reliance on Moore’s Law signals “the industry may need to rethink the central tenet of Silicon Valley’s innovation ethos,” writes John Markoff for the New York Times. Scientists are nearing the point where they manipulate material as small as atoms. Within the next five years, they may bump into the boundaries of how tiny semiconductors can become. At that point, they may have to look for alternatives to silicon, which is used to make computer chips, or new design ideas in order to make computers more powerful. Thomas M. Conte, a Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientist and co-chairman of the effort to draw up a new set of benchmarks to replace the semiconductor reports. “Just relying on the semiconductor industry is no longer enough. We have to shift and punch through some walls and break through some barriers.” This isn’t the first time the industry claims Moore’s Law was running out of steam. In 2005, researchers were concerned about overheating processors, but the industry addressed the problem by splitting tasks among many processors, eventually giving us the multi-core processor.