Rock's laworMoore's second law, named for Arthur RockorGordon Moore, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[1] As of 2015, the price had reached about 14 billion US dollars.[2]
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.[citation needed]
The semiconductor industry has always been extremely capital-intensive, with ever-dropping manufacturing unit costs. 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.[3][4][5]
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[6] – and also that the fabrication plant cost per transistor (which has shown a pronounced downward trend[6]) may be more relevant as a constraint on Moore's Law.
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Semantically, a computer law is not a hard and fast law, but a rule of thumb, or axiom (postulation) |
