Moore's Law is a term attributed to Intel founder Gordon E. Moore who observed in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be purchased inexpensively and placed on an integrated-circuit doubles every year. He later revised this figure to every 2 years (1975). The doubling period is often mistakenly reported as "18 months" or shorter, this is due to being confused with the overall processing power of computers doubling at that rate because of additional factors such as increases in clock speed, increases in cache memory or improvements in chip design.
For almost as long as there's been Moore's Law there have been commentators predicting its demise due to the supposed limits of engineering having been reached. The ability to increase the number of transistors available is due to reducing transistor size rather than increasing the size of the integrated circuit. As of the first half of 2012 the smallest commercially available transistors on a microprocessor are 22 nanometers (around 1.5 Billion transistors per chip), their 1965 equivalent were 100 micrometers (100,000 nanometers) with 50 transistors per device.
However, it does appear that component size does have a limiting factor in the form of the Laws of Physics. On the smallest of scales electrons become "smeared" across time and space meaning that they can no longer remain contained within the boundaries of very small components which results in disastrous contamination of signal processing....