The Rising Tide of Semiconductor Cost

It Isn’t Transistory

 
There’s a quiet upheaval happening in the semiconductor industry. The rules that have always governed the industry are fraying, undoing assumptions that we took for granted, that was pounded into us in school. The irreproachable Moore’s Law, that exponential progress will make things cheaper, better, and faster over time, is dead.

People are starting to appreciate that making a chip is not easy. Shortages and the geopolitical concentration of TSMC and ASML have awakened the popular imagination and have highlighted the science-fiction-like process of chipmaking. The road ahead has obstacles that aren’t widely appreciated. Making a semiconductor is going to get even harder, more expensive, and more technical. In other words, the challenges are going to accelerate.

To operate in the future, chipmakers will need more scale, more talent, and more money. I’ve written about this before, but I want to dive deeper into what’s driving the rising costs of making a semiconductor. It affects the entire range of chips, from the most advanced chips to the most basic. The trend is not new, it’s already been happening, but I believe now it will start to pick up speed. And the price increases will likely impact every person on earth. This inflationary cost is not transitory.

To understand how we got here, I want to first refresh you on the death of Moore’s Law. We’ve topped out the growth in transistor-energy scaling, frequency scaling, and we’re starting to hit the end of multi-core scaling in transistor-density increases. But more important than the end of those trends, cost scaling has ended. While we continue to improve transistor density through new techniques, each one layers additional costs.

ASML, in its investor day, made a bold statement that Moore’s Law will continue with system-level scaling. Another name for this is advanced packaging. But these costs are additive to the already escalating costs of making a smaller transistor.

 
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Πηγή: fabricatedknowledge.com

 
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All about SEMICONDUCTORS | A special episode of The Knowledge Project
All about SEMICONDUCTORS | A special episode of The Knowledge Project