Moore’s Law to Die Due to the Expense?

Yesterday, we posted about GlobalFoundries’ demonstration of silicon built on a 22nm node, and according to some reports, that’s just about as low as we’re going to be able to go, at least for a while. According to market research company iSuppli, Moore’s Law is going to die at 18nm. As you’re probably already well-aware, Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors will double on an integrated circuit every 1.5 – 2 years.

To date, that seemingly simple theory has held true, so what’s going to cause a sudden halt? It’s easy to assume that dies are simply going to become too small, and impossible to build, but that’s not it at all. And no, it has nothing to do with current leakage. Rather, it appears the reason for the death of Moore’s Law is… money. iSuppli states that beyond 18nm, the fabs to produce such chips are going to be incredibly expensive, and given that 32nm fabs currently cost around $4 billion… enough said.

Producing silicon on processes of at or smaller than 18nm isn’t impossible, but thanks to the costs, whichever company can produce such products is going to belong to an incredibly exclusive club. Companies like the TSMC and Intel should have no problem stomaching the bill, but up-and-comers like GlobalFoundries may have a hard time with the financials. But the real question is whether or not there will be a true return-of-investment on such expenses. We’ll have to wait and see.

“The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nm, to 18 nm nodes,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. “At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it.”