1965年，Intel公司的共同创始人——Godon Moore先生根据1961年第一块集成电路(IC)发明之后的5年内，IC中晶体管数目增加的事实，发现了晶体管的数目每隔两年就翻一番，芯片的集成度每十八个月就翻一番的规律。这种发展速率被公认为定律——摩尔定律，并成为指导半导体行业和半导体集成电路发展的指路明灯。

在科学技术不断发展的背景下，摩尔定律得到了验证和支持。不过，摩尔定律也一直随时间的推移而不断完善，Moore先生在随后也对相关术语进行了扩充。为了让摩尔定律能够继续下去，人们已经研究和分析了摩尔定律继续下去的困难，以及可以克服的原因。

The original Moore's Law, first uttered in 1965 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later), spoke of the number of components on the lowest-cost silicon integrated circuits — but Moore's own formulation varied somewhat over the years, and reconstructing the meaning of the terminology he used in the original turns out to be fraught with difficulties. Further variants were spawned by Intel's PR department and various journalists.

It has been shown that none of the variants of Moore's Law actually fit the data very well (the price curves within DRAM generations perhaps come closest).

Nevertheless, Moore's Law is constantly invoked to set up expectations about the next generation of computing technology. See also Parkinson's Law of Data and Gates's Law.