Rock's Law

Rock's Law, named for Arthur Rock, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years. As of 2003, the price had already reached about 3 billion US dollars.

Related Topics:
Arthur Rock - Fabrication plant - 2003

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Rock's Law can be seen as the economic flipside to Moore's Law; 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 creation of even more innovative products.

Related Topics:
Moore's Law - Large-scale integration

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An end to Moore's Law has been predicted many times in the past few decades, but in every case seemingly insurmountable technological obstacles have fallen to the relentless application of human ingenuity in the pursuit of a profit. For instance, some pundits might now have you believe that the ultimate limit to Moore's Law is that each component of a chip, (eg. one emitter of one transistor) must consist of at least one atom. But there is no law of physics that dictates this—who's to say you couldn't build circuits based, for instance, on quantum chromodynamics in future?

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The semiconductor industry has always been extremely capital-intensive, with very low unit manufacturing 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.

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