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. As of 2015, the price had reached about 14 billion US dollars.
Rock's law can be seen as the economic flip side to Moore's (first) law – that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. 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 the 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.
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 – and also that the fabrication plant cost per transistor (which has shown a pronounced downward trend) may be more relevant as a constraint on Moore's Law.
See also
- Semiconductor device fabrication
- Fabless manufacturing
- Wirth's law, an analogous law about software complicating over time
- Semiconductor consolidation
References
- "FAQs". India Electronics & Semiconductor Association. Archived from the original on 2017-11-20. Retrieved 2013-04-09.
- Armasu, Lucian (8 May 2015). "Samsung's New $14 Billion Chip Plant To Manufacture DRAM, Processors In 2017". Tom's Hardware. Reuters.
- Dorsch, Jeff. "Does Moore's Law Still Hold Up?" (PDF). Edavision.com. Archived from the original on 6 May 2006.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - Schaller, Bob (1996). "The Origin, Nature, and Implications of 'Moore's Law'". Research.Microsoft.com. Archived from the original on 13 November 2008.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - Tremblay, Jean-François (26 June 2006). "Riding On Flat Panels". Chemical & Engineering News. 84 (26): 13–16. doi:10.1021/cen-v084n026.p013.
- ^ Ross, Philip E. (2003). "5 Commandments: The rules engineers live by weren't always set in stone". IEEE Spectrum.
External links
- Kanellos, Michael (2003). "Soaring costs of chipmaking recast industry". CNET. News.com. Archived from the original on 2013-01-19.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
| Computer laws | |
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| Semantically, a computer law is not a hard and fast law, but a rule of thumb, or axiom (postulation) |