SEMI ISS, Anne Kelleher, Moore's Law

G. Dan Hutcheson

The Chip Insider®

SEMI ISS: I have to say that 2022's conference was the best ever and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. It had record attendance and attendees were not disappointed. Maybe it was just the family-reunion-like euphoria from having travel and face-to-face meetings locked down for two years. Everyone thought video meetings were OK. Some even thought they were equivalent to in-person ... at least at the beginning of the lockdown. But think of it this way: a 4K video monitor is 2D, with a bandwidth limited color space, and only 8.29-kilopixels. With in-person meetings the resolution is limited by lighting and human eyes, which present a 3-D image with 10M colors and have a resolution of 576 megapixels. Compared to a video conference, SEMI ISS 2022 was like the difference between sparkling apple juice and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. No wonder it was euphoric!

But it was far more than resolution. A picture can only tell a 1000 words if the content is great, as this conference has shown. Here's my take ... The keynote by Intel's Ann Kelleher presented the best modern perspective on Moore's Law I have ever seen, making her a real Moore's Law scholar... Few people rise to the level of scholar on the subject.... The most common view of Moore's Law is that it's simply planar lithographic scaling... Given the 1965's paper's title, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits," I don't think Moore's Law is this limited. What's so important about Anne's slide is that it pulls in two concepts from what CalTech's Carver Mead meant when he coined the term of it and what I have called a chaotic attractor for emergent behavior that drives innovation in our industry. Anne bested that in this slide's title, "We Evolve Together as an Industry" and it's subtitle, "Moore's Law is About Innovation."... And what about STCO, or System-Technology Co-Optimization, where a single die is joined in a package with physical blocks of IP called chiplets?