Has Moore's Law Been Repealed? An Economist's Perspective
Overview
This article review examines Flamm's 2017 analysis of whether Moore's Law remains valid in semiconductor manufacturing. The paper explores the historical trajectory of transistor cost reduction, IC fabrication improvements, and argues that Moore's Law's predictive power has diminished due to thermal constraints, increasing complexity, and the slowing pace of technological innovation in chip production since 2012.
What this essay covers
- Objectives: Defines Moore's Law and its relationship to IC fabrication costs, examining transistor cost declines and performance improvements over two decades
- Summary: Chronicles Moore's Law from Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction through early 2000s rapid development, documenting the shift from frequency scaling to multicore architectures
- Economic Analysis: Discusses how economies of scale affect manufacturing capabilities and how only large companies can afford leading-edge fabrication technology
Preview
Article Review: has Moore's law been repealed? an economist's perspective
Bibliographic Reference
Flamm, K. (2017). Has Moore's Law Been Repealed? An Economist's Perspective. Computing in Science & Engineering, 19(2), 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1109/mcse.2017.30
Objectives
The objectives of the article include the following:
- Defining Moore's law and how it relates to the marked transformation of the high-tech economy in terms of Integrated Circuit (IC) fabrication costs;
- Examining the declines in transistor costs and feature sizes together with improvements in performance over the past two decades;
- Interpreting the current economic history of Moore's law and how economies of scale help reduce manufacturing costs; and
- Identifying economic statistics supporting technological evidence shows that chip production innovation is slowing down.
Summary
Moore's law is frequently used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry to explain the rapid development in semiconductor and IT price performance. Gordon E. Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of circuit elements on a single chip would double annually: his forecast has since been associated with declining chip fabrication costs. Moore's law is used in the semiconductor industry to analyze the economic cost of new technology nodes. In addition o predicting transistor costs, the underlying theory suggested lower power needs and faster switching times. The last twenty years have seen a rapid technology development cycle where wafer-processing costs halved every three years with newer technology nodes. For instance, the decade between 1995 and 2004 was a turning point in the semiconductor industry: in the first four years, processing and chip prices dropped by 62 per cent and 53 per cent, respectively.