Moore's Laws

Yes, plural. The familiar 1965 "Moore's Law" describes a doubling of chip density every two years. This was an empirical fit to experience, NOT a physical law of the universe, though the Singularity folks assume it is, disconnected from any other physical law or phenomena.

There is a second second Moore's Law, also known as Rock's Law, that says that the cost of a new fabrication plant (fab) doubles every four years. In 2015, the price of a fab was 14 billion dollars. Intel builds two or three fabs per generation, TSMC (their major technological competitor) a few more. In the heyday of the semiconductor industry, dozens of companies built new fabs and pushed chip density, now very few do, because a 14 billion dollar fab greatly exceeds their sales revenue.

The newest EUV processes will shrink devices perhaps another 2x. These use 13.5 nanometer wavelengths ( blue light is 400 nanometer), with an energy per photon of 92 electron volts. That corresponds to a photon "temperature" of 1.2 MILLION degrees Kelvin, focused on a very tiny device. I am amazed that these tiny little devices are not destroyed by this energy bombardment. The engineers at Intel are clever, but when the energies get too high, they will destroy chemical structure.

There will be other imaging modalities besides photons (molecular biology?), but photons are the "currency" of Moore's law scaling. The new modalities will have new constraints and empirical fits, and Moore's law will be replaced by a different empirical law.

But for the sake of argument, what would a "forever" Moore's Law actually mean? Assume the entire scale-driven semiconductor industry shrinks down to a single company, Intel. Intel is owned by investors, investors expect a profit, and Intel's revenue must pay for profits, salaries, benefits (pensions for all the old Intel employees), electricity and water and ... fabs. As a rough rule of thumb, what Intel pays for fabs cannot grow faster than revenue. Here's Intel's revenue since 2009: