Moore’s Law once defined progress in the semiconductor industry through shrinking transistors and increasing density. As physical scaling reaches its limits and performance gains taper off, that definition is starting to shift. Erik Hosler, a consultant focused on user-centered innovation in chip development, points to a new direction already taking shape. Progress is being measured less by how small components can be made and more by how effectively technology delivers value to the people using it.
This change is influencing how chips are designed, integrated, and evaluated. Performance now includes responsiveness, efficiency, and reliability across real-world applications. These qualities are becoming central to how innovation is understood across the semiconductor ecosystem.
When Shrinking Stops Being the Point
From the 1970s through the early 2010s, Moore’s Law was interpreted quite literally. Every new node means smaller transistors, better performance, and greater energy efficiency. But at the sub-10nm scale, benefits are harder to come by. Increasing density often leads to diminishing returns due to power leakage, heat buildup, and cost escalation.
These realities have triggered a reevaluation of what it means to improve a chip. Today, performance is just as likely to come from smarter architecture, clever power management, or heterogeneous integration as it is from shrinking components. And importantly, these strategies often aim to enhance user experience rather than merely push benchmarks.
Experience as the New Metric
Consider the most visible technologies of the current era: voice assistants, real-time language translation, mixed-reality headsets, and intelligent edge devices. Their appeal lies not in GHz or nanometers but in immediacy, responsiveness, and fluid interactivity. Users rarely ask what node their processor was built on. They care whether the technology works effortlessly.
This reorientation toward experience influences how chips are designed. Faster local inference on edge AI chips, for example, delivers smoother video processing or real-time object recognition. Energy-efficient processors extend battery life in wearables without sacrificing responsiveness. These improvements speak directly to how users interact with devices, and that is becoming the new standard of progress.
User-Centered Design as Engineering Priority
As user needs drive development, design priorities shift. No longer is it sufficient to deliver maximum compute power in isolation. Instead, chip designers must work backward from the application context, optimizing responsiveness, form factor, power usage, and intuitive behavior.
In healthcare wearables, this might mean real-time sensing with secure, on-device data processing. In autonomous vehicles, it could involve split-second inference with built-in redundancy and safety margins. These are not abstract engineering goals. They are tangible user expectations, and meeting them requires intentional, context-aware engineering.
The convergence of performance and usability places human experience at the center of technological progress. That shift reframes Moore’s Law’s legacy from the silicon race to human relevance.
Integration Over Isolation
The shift toward experience-centric design coincides with another trend: the integration of diverse technologies into single systems. Rather than trying to solve every challenge through CMOS logic alone, today’s engineers blend complementary platforms: specialized accelerators, memory systems, wireless modules, and increasingly novel components like photonics and MEMS.
Photonics enables faster data transfer between chips, while MEMS adds physical-world sensing and interaction capabilities. These technologies do not directly reduce the feature size, but they elevate function. In doing so, they support the same end goal Moore’s Law originally promised: doing more with less, only now defined in terms of capability rather than raw transistor count.
The Changing Role of the Chip
In this new model, the chip is no longer an isolated computation engine. It becomes part of a larger, more intelligent system, working in concert with software layers, cloud connectivity, and analog inputs. This system-oriented view changes how we approach everything from design to measurement.
For example, a chip that offloads speech recognition to a neural processing unit may deliver more meaningful performance than one that simply has a higher clock speed. Similarly, a processor optimized for low-latency response in autonomous vehicles provides real-world safety benefits that cannot be captured in traditional benchmarks. In short, the future is less about Moore’s Law in its classic form and more about fulfilling its spirit in new contexts.
Performance, Redefined
Redefining performance involves expanding the criteria for progress. Power efficiency, thermal stability, consistent data flow, and responsive behavior are now treated as essential attributes. These qualities often result from system-level design choices rather than advances in lithography.
Chiplets offer a clear example. Instead of relying on a single large die, designers can combine multiple smaller modules into a unified package. This approach supports the integration of different process nodes, blends analog and digital functions, and allows systems to be tailored to specific applications. The result is not smaller features but more adaptable, application-ready platforms.
An Ecosystem Approach to Scaling
Meeting modern expectations requires a coordinated effort across disciplines: electrical, optical, mechanical, and computational. Innovation no longer resides solely in transistor engineering but in the interfaces between components, in how data moves, and in how systems respond to the world.
That is why the industry is embracing photonics and MEMS, not just for technical novelty but because they serve this broader goal of enhancing system experience. Light-based communication reduces latency, and MEMS enables contextual awareness. Together, they bridge the gap between digital capability and human expectations.
Erik Hosler stresses, “Finally, the solution to keeping Moore’s Law going may entail incorporating photonics, MEMS, and other new technologies into the toolkit.” Rather than measuring size as a measure of advancement, the industry is increasingly focusing on functionality, user value, and cross-domain constructive collaboration.
Reimagining Progress Through Convergence
Moore’s Law is not dead. But it is improving. Where we once counted transistors, we now count experiences. Where once we pushed masks and etches, now we compose ecosystems of complementary technologies.
In this new paradigm, scaling does not disappear. It becomes about scaling intelligence, not just computation. About scaling usability, not just density. About scaling value, not just volume. What lies ahead is not a race for smaller nodes but a pursuit of smarter integration.
With each advancement, the line between hardware, software, and applications becomes more porous and more powerful. Experience, not the equation, becomes a measure of meaningful innovation. As the industry continues to reimagine its benchmarks, the future of progress will be defined not just by what chips can do but by how people feel about using them.
