Communications of the ACM
Isuppli: Gear Costs to Derail Moore's Law in 2014
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Market research firm ISuppli predicts Moore's Law will end after 2014 due to the high cost of chip manufacturing equipment. The market research firm expects advances in shrinking process geometries to continue after the 20- to 18-nm nodes in the laboratory.
"At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it," says iSuppli's Len Jelinek.
The industry has tried to scale on pace with Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction that the number of transistors placed on a semiconductor would double every two years. There have been some concerns about technical issues or physical limitations, but iSuppli says revenue generation at specific technology nodes is no longer keeping up with the cost of chip-making equipment. "The semiconductor industry will be living with historical generations of technology longer than it did before," Jelinek says. "You are not seeing these geometries rise and fall off the way they did before. Rather, they are living on."
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