‘Law’ that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul de sac
From www.theregister.com
2021-08-05 04:30:00
Excerpt:
In 1975, eight years after leaving Fairchild to co-found Intel, Moore revised his “law”, actually just an observation, to a doubling every two years. But the other predictions in his original paper of revolutions in computing, communication and general electronics had taken hold. The chip industry had the perfect metric to aim for a rolling, virtuous milestone like no other.
Since then, according to Professor Erica Fuchs of Carnegie Mellon University, “half of economic growth in the US and worldwide has also been attributed to this trend and the innovations it enabled throughout the economy.” Virtually all of industry, science, medicine, and every aspect of daily life now depends on computers that are ever faster, cheaper, and more widely spread…..
….during the three-node transition from 65nm through 40nm to 28nm, cost per wafer went up by only a third from $2k to $3k while per-chip dropped by two-thirds from $1,428 to $453. Those days have gone, and are not coming back.
Even if there are two or three more cycles left through transistors, packaging and architectural changes, the drivers that Gordon Moore saw for silicon have been replaced by force of habit. What alternatives are there?
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