Moore's Law in CLEAR Light

The inability of Moore's Law and other figure-of-merits (FOMs) to accurately explain the technology development of the semiconductor industry demands a holistic merit to guide the industry. Here we introduce a FOM termed CLEAR that accurately postdicts technology developments since the 1940's until today, and predicts photonics as a logical extension to keep-up the pace of information-handling machines. We show that CLEAR (Capability-to-Latency-Energy-Amount-Resistance) is multi-hierarchical applying to the device, interconnect, and system level. Being a holistic FOM, we show that empirical trends such as Moore's Law and the Makimoto's wave are special cases of the universal CLEAR merit. Looking ahead, photonic board- and chip-level technologies are able to continue the observed doubling rate of the CLEAR value every 12 months, while electronic technologies are unable to keep pace.