Moore’s Law appears to be coming to the end. It is getting too expensive to double transistors, particularly at the historic rate of every two years. Does that matter? What happens if it does?
The semiconductor industry is one of the few industries that produce a product that enables the advancement of the industry. The chips that are produced are used to improve design and manufacturing for the next round of products. Under the Moore’s Law paradigm, the improved chips enabled increased performance while reducing cost. Consumers felt that they needed to upgrade their computers on a regular basis just to keep up. As a result, demand continued to climb. As Moore’s Law faltered, hardware improvements slowed. The consumer did not feel the need to upgrade as often and demand slowed. The mobile market provided a boost to chip demand, but trading computing power for mobility. That market, now, seems to have reached its apex. So, the next hope is to build more servers for Cloud applications, trying to share cost of more expensive chips and IoT to massively deploy low-end chips to leverage the economies of scale.
The problem is if the cost of the improved chips goes up, the next round cost will also go up. Instead of a downward cost spiral enabled by Moore’s Law, that spiral will turn upward. The ROI will continue to shrink for semiconductor companies and negatively impact the electronics market. This, in turn, will hurt global economies.
Whether you believe in Moore’s Law or not, its multi-decade trend has produced incredible capabilities for businesses and customers. It has enabled emerging markets and economies and has improved cultures. I contend that the cost/performance improvements in the semiconductor industry are a necessary driver for continued economic growth.
Now is the time to change semiconductor manufacturing to affect a return to the Moore’s Law trend. It is time to drive 3D integration.