IEEE Spectrum April, 2015 - 57

Law dying here in the next decade or so,
but that's not surprising.
r.C.: do you think the way we consume
electronics will change as Moore's Law
comes to a close?
g.M.: I don't think it's likely to change
much. As long as the new products offer
incremental capability, I think they will
replace the older ones pretty rapidly.
When we run out of ideas of what to add,
then people may decide they don't need a
new one every year, hang on to the same
piece of equipment for three, four, five
years. That'll slow down the industry quite
a bit. But I think it's inevitable that something like that occur.
r.C.: there're the fundamental physical limits-the atomic scale, the
speed of light-and then there's also
the cost associated with fabricating smaller and smaller transistors.
Which do you think we'll hit first? Is
it going to be the cost or the fundamental physical limits? I guess
they're tied together.
g.M.: They really are, yeah. Making things
smaller is increasingly expensive. Fabs to
operate on the newest technology nodes
are absurd. It's hard to think Intel started
with [US] $3 million total capital. Now you
can't buy one tool, you can't even install
one tool for that much, I don't think. The
machines have gotten a lot more expensive and complex. On the other hand, their
productivity in terms of transistors out per
unit time has increased dramatically. So
we can still afford to build a few fabs to utilize the modern technology.
We've had a lot of companies decide
it was too expensive to move to the next
generation already. There are only a few of
us in the world that are investing in stateof-the-art fab facilities today. And I don't
see that number changing much over the
next generation or two.
r.C.: your initial prediction was largely
based on the idea that the cost of each
component on a chip was decreasing.
so is that going to be the thing that
decides it in the end? It's an economic
law, so it'll have an economic demise?
g.M.: I think it's going to be a technological demise rather than an economic one.
People will continue to squeeze cost out

of the products for quite a while after they
can't make them any smaller. I'm sure
that's happening already.
r.C.: I told a few people that I was
going to meet you today, and I asked
them what questions I should ask.
some just sort of laughed and said,
"Can you ask him how we get out of this
mess?" because they're all struggling
with these technological issues.

g.M.: Whoo. Well, you could always retire
and move to Hawaii.
r.C.: I think they're trying to get to
that point.
g.M.: Yeah, well, it's the nature of the business. There aren't many easy businesses,
and this certainly isn't one of them.
This interview has been edited for length
and clarity.

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum April, 2015
