Moore's second law
Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[1] As of 2015, the price had already reached about 14 billion US dollars.[2] Rock's law can be seen as the economic flip side to Moore's (first) law – that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. The latter is a direct consequence of the ongoing growth of the capital-intensive semiconductor industry— innovative and popular products mean more profits, meaning more capital available to invest in ever higher levels of large-scale integration, which in turn leads to the creation of even more innovative products.[citation needed]
The semiconductor industry has always been extremely capital-intensive, with ever-dropping manufacturing unit costs. Thus, the ultimate limits to growth of the industry will constrain the maximum amount of capital that can be invested in new products; at some point, Rock's Law will collide with Moore's Law.[3][4][5]
It has been suggested that fabrication plant costs have not increased as quickly as predicted by Rock's law – indeed plateauing in the late 1990s[6] – and also that the fabrication plant cost per transistor (which has shown a pronounced downward trend[6]) may be more relevant as a constraint on Moore's Law.
See also
- Semiconductor device fabrication
- Fabless manufacturing
- Wirth's law, an analogous law about software complicating over time
- Semiconductor consolidation
References
- ↑ "FAQs". India Electronics & Semiconductor Association. http://www.iesaonline.org/aboutus/faq_pg3.html.
- ↑ Armasu, Lucian (8 May 2015). "Samsung's New $14 Billion Chip Plant To Manufacture DRAM, Processors In 2017". Tom's Hardware. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-14-billion-chip-plant,29058.html.
- ↑ Dorsch, Jeff. "Does Moore's Law Still Hold Up?". Edavision.com. http://www.edavision.com/200111/feature.pdf.
- ↑ Schaller, Bob (1996). "The Origin, Nature, and Implications of 'Moore's Law'". Research.Microsoft.com. http://research.microsoft.com/~gray/Moore_Law.html.
- ↑ Tremblay, Jean-François (26 June 2006). "Riding On Flat Panels". Chemical & Engineering News 84 (26): 13–16. doi:10.1021/cen-v084n026.p013. http://cen.acs.org/articles/84/i26/Riding-Flat-Panels.html.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Ross, Philip E. (2003). "5 Commandments: The rules engineers live by weren't always set in stone". IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/5-commandments.
External links
- Kanellos, Michael (2003). "Soaring costs of chipmaking recast industry". CNET. News.com. http://news.com.com/Semi+survival/2009-1001_3-981418.html.
 |  |
