It seems to me that the key point is Moore’s second law, leading to centralization. Centralized facilities are easy to sabotage. But if this law keeps going, it might end Moore’s law all on its own.
If the capital expense of a fab keeps growing exponentially, pretty soon there will be a monopoly on state of the art silicon. What happens to the economics then? It seems to remove much of the incentive to build better fabs. Even if pricing keeps on as normal, the exponentially increasing cost of the fabs seems hard to finance.
The obvious solution is not to make them so big. This gives up some economy of scale, but if the alternative is not building a better fab, it will probably happen, at least for a couple of cycles. How far can this be pushed? It seems to me that this is exactly the same question that people will ask if a single big fab is destroyed and they want to decentralize.
It seems to me that the key point is Moore’s second law, leading to centralization. Centralized facilities are easy to sabotage. But if this law keeps going, it might end Moore’s law all on its own.
If the capital expense of a fab keeps growing exponentially, pretty soon there will be a monopoly on state of the art silicon. What happens to the economics then? It seems to remove much of the incentive to build better fabs. Even if pricing keeps on as normal, the exponentially increasing cost of the fabs seems hard to finance.
The obvious solution is not to make them so big. This gives up some economy of scale, but if the alternative is not building a better fab, it will probably happen, at least for a couple of cycles. How far can this be pushed? It seems to me that this is exactly the same question that people will ask if a single big fab is destroyed and they want to decentralize.