Design Costs too high? What’s after Moore’s Law?

G. Dan Hutcheson

The Chip Insider®

Summary:

Are Semiconductor Design Costs too high? Since the seventies, there have been two common themes about cost leading to the destruction of the semiconductor industry. One was the cost of a wafer fab and the other was the cost of design. In the seventies, the complaint about equipment rose as the cost of a wafer fab approached $10M – an amount lower than the price of many tool types in the fab today. The fact that fab owners still wait in line to buy semiconductor production tools is de facto proof of the falseness of the equipment cost claim. But what about design costs? … Are design costs choking off advanced designs? According to TechInsights Design Completion data, the top-3 most advanced nodes in 2022 have grown at …

Moore’s Law: How do you know it’s broken and what happens after? There is a significant paradox about Moore’s Law today… So what’s next? If we look at the auto industry, Henry Ford had a Moore’s Law-like cost-down model centered on innovations in factory automation. The mechanisms for both rely on Jevon’s Paradox … I believe the semiconductor industry has been shifting from a cost-down model to a value-up model, which was ignited by … In other words, value accumulates over time, which can be expressed as Total Value of Ownership or TVOO (pronounced as TeeVoo) …

“History never repeats itself but it often rhymes.” — Mark Twain

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