Is the Cost Reduction Associated with Scaling Over?

By _MonolithIC 3D

June 21, 2012

The last 50 years of the semiconductor industry have been all about the manifestation of Moore's Law in dimensional scaling of Integrated Circuits (ICs). As consumers of electronic devices we all love to see with every new product cycle better products at a lower cost. But now storm clouds are forming, as was recently publicly expressed "Nvidia deeply unhappy with TSMC, claims 20nm essentially worthless".

Clearly dimensional scaling is no longer associated with lower average cost per transistor. The chart below, published by IBS about a year ago, shows the diminishing benefit of cost reduction from dimensional scaling. In fact, the chart indicates that the 20nm node might be associated with higher cost than the previous node

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