Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for
Arthur Rock
Arthur Rock (born August 19, 1926) is an American businessman and investor. Based in Silicon Valley, California, he was an early investor in major firms including Intel, Apple Inc., Apple, Scientific Data Systems and Teledyne Technologies, Teled ...
or
Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (January 3, 1929 – March 24, 2023) was an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation. He proposed Moore's law which makes the observation that the number of transistors i ...
, says that the cost of a
semiconductor chip
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
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
An integrated circuit (IC), also known as a microchip or simply chip, is a set of electronic circuits, consisting of various electronic components (such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors) and their interconnections. These components a ...
, 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
A company, abbreviated as co., is a Legal personality, legal entity representing an association of legal people, whether Natural person, natural, Juridical person, juridical or a mixture ...
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 circuits (ICs) such as microprocessors, microcontrollers, and memories (such as Random-access memory, RAM and flash memory). It is a ...
*Fabless manufacturing
Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing their Semiconductor fabrication, fabrication (or ''fab'') to a specialized manufacturer called a Foundry (electronics), semiconductor found ...
* Wirth's law, an analogous law about software complicating over time
* Semiconductor consolidation
References
External links
*
{{Computer laws
Adages
Computer architecture statements
Computer industry
Computing culture
Electronic design
Temporal exponentials
Rules of thumb
Electronics industry