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As process nodes shrink, semiconductor scaling more or less follows the predictions of Moore's Law - but there are some surprising twists and turns. In a keynote speech at the Design Automation Conference (DAC 2012) June 5, Mike Muller, co-founder and CTO of ARM, compared the original ARM1 processor of 1985 to the recent ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller to show what has and hasn't changed. He also talked about future technologies including 3D stacking.

The keynote was titled "Scaling for 2020 Solutions," and a video recording is available at the DAC web site. (Note: The video starts with the opening session at DAC June 5, which featured some acknowledgements and awards presentations. Keep advancing and you'll get to the keynote).

In preparation for the talk, Muller dug out the original documentation and layout files for the ARM1, from a design effort that started in 1983. This was no small task, as it involved finding a way to read Exabyte files, translate variable length records, and parse an obsolete layout format. However, Muller was able to produce a GDSII file from the documentation.

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