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
In the microelectronics industry, a semiconductor fabrication plant (commonly called a fab; sometimes foundry) is a factory where devices such as integrated circuits are manufactured.
Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates ...
doubles every four years. As of 2015, the price had already 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 cost
The unit cost is the price incurred by a company to produce, store and sell one unit of a particular product. Unit costs include all fixed costs and all variable costs
Variable costs are costs that change as the quantity of the good or service ...
s. 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
Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture semiconductor devices, typically integrated circuit (IC) chips such as modern computer processors, microcontrollers, and memory chips such as NAND flash and DRAM that are pres ...
* Fabless manufacturing
*Wirth's law
Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea ...
, an analogous law about software complicating over time
*Semiconductor consolidation
Semiconductor consolidation is the trend of semiconductor companies collaborating in order to come to a practical synergy with the goal of being able to operate in a business model that can sustain profitability.
History
Since the rapid adoptio ...
References
External links
*
{{Computer laws
Adages
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