📈⏳ The broken bargain of Moore’s Law
Summary
TSMC has reportedly decided against adopting ASML's High-NA EUV chipmaking machines through 2029 due to their high cost. This decision signals a potential reversal in the long-standing economic bargain of Moore's Law, which historically ensured that each new generation of chip manufacturing tools delivered cheaper transistors. While the physical limits of transistor density have been slowing for years, the cost per transistor continued to fall until 2011. The introduction of EUV lithography around 2019 helped maintain the cost-down curve for transistors per wafer-dollar for another decade, but this trend has now reversed. TSMC's hesitation suggests that the economic benefits of advanced lithography may no longer outweigh the escalating equipment costs, impacting the future trajectory of semiconductor economics.
Key takeaway
For Directors of AI/ML and VPs of Engineering planning future compute infrastructure, you should re-evaluate long-term hardware cost projections. The historical assumption of continually decreasing compute costs per operation may no longer hold, necessitating a shift towards optimizing existing hardware or exploring alternative architectures to manage escalating expenses.
Key insights
Moore's Law's economic bargain of cheaper transistors per generation is reversing due to escalating equipment costs.
Principles
- Moore's Law has both physical and economic dimensions.
- Cost per transistor stopped falling in 2011.
In practice
- EUV lithography extended cost-down curve until recently.
- High-NA EUV faces adoption hurdles due to cost.
Topics
- Moore's Law
- Semiconductor Manufacturing
- ASML High-NA EUV
- TSMC
- Chip Economics
Best for: VP of Engineering/Data, Director of AI/ML, Executive, CTO, Investor, Tech Journalist
Related on AIssential
Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by Exponential View.