Rock's law
Rock's law or Moore's Second Law, named for Arthur Rock, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of 2003, the price had already reached about 3 billion US dollars.
Rock's Law can be seen as the economic flipside to Moore's Law; 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 creation of even more innovative products.
The semiconductor industry has always been extremely capital-intensive, with very low unit manufacturing 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.[1][2][3]
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[4] – and also that the fabrication plant cost per transistor (which has shown a pronounced downward trend[4]) may be more relevant as a constraint on Moore's Law.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Does Moore's Law Still Hold?
- ^ Moore's Law article by Bob Schaller
- ^ 2006 Chemical & Engineering News article on materials suppliers challenged by rising costs
- ^ a b Rock's Law Fails to Hold
