SEMI recognizes equipment and materials makers’ role in Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law turns 50 this month, and the April issue of IEEE Spectrum offers several interesting articles on the topic—including associate editor Rachel Courtland’s interview with Gordon Moore himself. Spectrum covers Moore’s Law’s history as well as its often predicted demise—and the benefits that could bring.

What Spectrum doesn’t emphasize is the role semiconductor equipment and materials suppliers have played, although Moore does tell Courtland that you can’t even buy and install a single tool today for the $3 million in capital that launched Intel. So SEMI has stepped up to recognize the enabling contributions made by the over 1,900 SEMI member companies and their role in producing 219 billion integrated circuit devices and 766 billion semiconductor units per year.

“It was SEMI member companies who enabled Moore’s Law’s incredible exponential growth over the last 50 years,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI, in a press release. “Whereas hundreds of transistors on an IC was noteworthy in the 1960s, today over 1.3 billion transistors are on a single IC. SEMI member companies provide the capital equipment and materials for today’s mega-fabs, with each one processing hundreds or thousands of ICs on each wafer with more than 100,000 wafers processed per month.”

Here is a table highlighting progress over the years:

	1971	2015
Price per chip	$351	$393
Price per 1,000 transistors	$150	$0.0003
Number of transistors per chip	2,300	1,300,000,000
Minimum feature size on chip	10,000 nm	14 nm

From SEMI infographic “Why Moore Matters”: www.semi.org/node/55026

SEMI has released a series of infographics on the topic “Making Small Things Makes Big Things Possible”:

Why Moore Matters: semi.org/node/55026
From Sand to Systems: semi.org/node/55011
Materials Innovations: semi.org/node/55021
Lithography: semi.org/node/55016
Achieving Together: semi.org/node/55006

SEMI is the global industry association serving the nano- and micro-electronic manufacturing supply chains. Since 1970, SEMI has been committed to helping members grow more profitably, create new markets, and meet common industry challenges. SEMI maintains offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Grenoble, Hsinchu, Moscow, San Jose, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, DC.