Rock's law

Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock or Gordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[1] As of 2003, the price had already reached about 3 billion US dollars.

Rock's law can be seen as the economic flip side 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 ever-dropping manufacturing unit 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.[2][3][4]

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[5] – and also that the fabrication plant cost per transistor (which has shown a pronounced downward trend[5]) may be more relevant as a constraint on Moore's Law.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "FAQs", India Electronics & Semiconductor Association.
  2. ↑ Dorsch, Jeff. "Does Moore's Law Still Hold Up?", Edavision.com at the Wayback Machine (archived May 6, 2006).
  3. ↑ Schaller, Bob (1996). "The Origin, Nature, and Implications of 'Moore's Law'", Research.Microsoft.com at the Wayback Machine (archived January 7, 2012).
  4. ↑ Tremblay, Jean-François (2006). Riding On Flat Panels", CEN.ACS.org.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Ross, Philip E. (2003). "5 Commandments", Spectrum.IEEE.org.

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