The tech industry often discusses how much time is left for Moore's Law. Milind Shah, head of integrated circuit packaging at Google, recently backed up the previous claim that the Moore's Law trend, an important pointer for the tech industry, came to an end in 2014.
In 1965, the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore theorized that the number of transistors per square inch on a circuit board would double roughly every two years. The theory that bears his name has remained largely unchanged for nearly 60 years, but has recently faced continued turmoil.
In 2014, Zvi Or-Bach, CEO of Monolithic, noted that the cost of a 100 million-gate transistor had been steadily declining until then, bottoming out at the 28nm node at the time.
Speaking at the 2023 IEDM conference, Shah backed up Or-Bach's claim with a chart showing that the ** of 100 million gate transistors has remained flat since then, suggesting that transistors haven't gotten cheaper over the past decade, according to Semiconductor Digest.
While chipmakers continue to shrink semiconductors and pack more semiconductors into increasingly powerful chips, the number of semiconductors and power consumption is increasing. Since 2017, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has repeatedly declared that Moore's Law is dead, trying to explain the trend, saying that more powerful hardware will inevitably cost more and require more energy.
Recently, there have been accusations that the CEO of NVIDIA is making excuses for NVIDIA graphics cards***. At the same time, the heads of AMD and Intel acknowledge that Moore's Law has at least slowed down, but claim that they can still achieve meaningful performance and efficiency gains with innovations such as 3D packaging.
Or-Bach's and later Shah's analysis may coincide with TSMC's wafer price hike, which accelerated dramatically after 28nm in 2014. With the introduction of the 10nm process in 2016, the Taiwanese giant's cost per wafer doubled in the following two years, according to DigiTimes. According to this estimate, the cost of the latest 3nm wafer could reach $20,000.
As TSMC and its competitors shift their targets to 2nm and 1nm in the coming years, further analysis suggests that the semiconductor industry's recent growth has largely come from wafers. Despite the decline in wafer sales over the past few years, the average of TSMC wafers has continued.