Are technology improvement rates of knowledge industries following Moore’s law? : an empirical study of microprocessor, mobile cellular, and genome sequencing technologies

Many of the critical technologies in knowledge economy are undergoing an exponential rate of rapid improvement. The best known roadmap to guide exponential trend of improvement has been provided by Moore’s law. This paper will update the validity of Moore’s law by applying it to microprocessor technology. Using Moore’s law as the benchmark, then, we will examine how well the historical trends of performance improvement in speed for mobile cellular, genome sequencing, and microprocessor technologies have followed Moore’s law. We will also test whether the improvement rate have begun to slow down in recent years. Our finding indicates that Moore’s law remains valid over the last 40 years. However, improvement rate of speed measure varies for each technology. Another finding is that more recent improvement rate during the last 10 years again vary between different technologies. For example, a significant acceleration in the improvement rate for genome sequencing technology has occurred, while a marked slowdown has taken place to microprocessor’s clock speed. All of these variations, however, do not alter the fact that exponential trend indicated by Moore’s law remains valid to guide overall improvement of speed expected of these technologies