[urthor]

Moore's law is:

Transistor density doubling every 18 months for a similar cost.

https://t7m8e9c8.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/pre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#cite_note-Moore_...

By those terms, Moore's law is totally extinct.

Folk haven't noticed however, because the "leading edge" logic manufacturers have 60% gross margins. The vast majority of their costs are in design, distribution and overhead.

Price rises of 30% to 100% have disguised that the cost of manufacturing the silicon is an order of magnitude more than a decade ago.

Granted, the above numbers are not the actual inflation adjusted wafer cost for leading edge nodes.

But, $16,000 for a 300mm wafer is extraordinary.

[pedrocr]

Most people believe Moore's law has already stopped on the density side. Jim Keller claims we have 50 more years of it at least. If it failed on the economic side only instead then the implications are very different. I do wonder if on the economic side of the law we are missing a bunch of innovation because every node step also reduced the number of players in the market. Right now on the bleeding edge there are only 3 players and that keeps trending down. They're also all ASML clients so we're pretty close to having a single monoculture in semiconductor fabrication. Maybe that's an inevitable result of the problem space but I do wonder if at least some of our lost efficiency comes from there.

[urthor]

Costs are rising by ~50% every cycle give or take.

Exponential growth is exponential growth.

They'll exceed the GDP of the United States in a few cycles.

The question becomes, when costs hit the ceiling that Apple is willing to pay, will TSMC still be able to front up with the good stuff and deliver the growth.

[pedrocr]

Obviously exceeding total GDP is not possible and we'll stop well before from just commercial considerarions as you describe. The question is how much of that is inherent to the problem and how much is lack of innovation. And we'll get to find out because if the processes stall from the economic side all the research turns to that whereas today it's an arms race for the next node and the increasing cost is taken as a given because as long as you get there the customers also arrive. Once that's no longer the case it frees up competitors from just chasing the node at equivalent costs to actually innovating on the total cost. If that leads to nothing then maybe we actually stop almost completely.

[urthor]

Tbh, it's less of a research problem per se, and more of an implementation one, in many ways.

The current pace of development is such that that they are plugging stuff in and hoping it works in LOTS of different ways.

A small army of electrical engineers work night shifts at TSMC as well, something Intel could never pull off given American labour market demand for EEs.

I suspect you're right, when costs have to come down timelines will blow out to something more reasonable.