6: How does the desire for more technological progress relate with the current level of a technology? Is it proportional, as per the exponential growth story?
Most of the discussion of laws such as Moore’s law and Kryder’s law focus on the question of technological feasibility. But demand-side considerations matter, because that’s what motivates investments in these technologies.
Actually I consider this to be the more dominant part in the equation. In principle the size of transistors could have been reduced much faster. Namely in steps up to (or rather down to) the resolution of the corresponding lithographic technique. But surely this would have involved higher investments at any single point. If you indeed have a constant demand factor as suggested, then this demand can basically be met with the smallest technological improvement shrinking the transistor size by the given factor within the time it takes to bring the improvements to market. Shrinking transistors faster has higher costs and risks and very limited benefits. Shrinking a bit faster might provide a competive advantage but this still has to balance against the costs and will not change the exponential curve (which, if the technology would progress toward the next principle border would be a step function where significantly different time and effort are ‘only’ needed to discover new lithographic techniques).
This sidestepts the fact that there are technological challenges beside lithography like better clean rooms, better etching/doting which have to follow shrinking. And this also ignores that there is a large component in algorithmic complexity (complexity of the ICs and complexity to design and route more compley IC). But these actually should have led to a super-exponential effects because a) they are not strictly needed to match the demand (until the next physical boundary) and b) using your own improved tools to improve the results beyond the pure shrinking but instead allowing for quicker design and additional speed-ups should show as super-exponential development. But neither does.
From this I conclude that it is not the technology which is limiting but the demand is (basically).
All this is based on the asummption that there are not too many limiting technological borders. If there were that would suggest lots of steps which might look exponential-like from a distance. I see that there are many small technological improvements but these are not limiting but rather cost-optimizations and thus don’t count for the present analysis.
Actually I consider this to be the more dominant part in the equation. In principle the size of transistors could have been reduced much faster. Namely in steps up to (or rather down to) the resolution of the corresponding lithographic technique. But surely this would have involved higher investments at any single point. If you indeed have a constant demand factor as suggested, then this demand can basically be met with the smallest technological improvement shrinking the transistor size by the given factor within the time it takes to bring the improvements to market. Shrinking transistors faster has higher costs and risks and very limited benefits. Shrinking a bit faster might provide a competive advantage but this still has to balance against the costs and will not change the exponential curve (which, if the technology would progress toward the next principle border would be a step function where significantly different time and effort are ‘only’ needed to discover new lithographic techniques).
This sidestepts the fact that there are technological challenges beside lithography like better clean rooms, better etching/doting which have to follow shrinking. And this also ignores that there is a large component in algorithmic complexity (complexity of the ICs and complexity to design and route more compley IC). But these actually should have led to a super-exponential effects because a) they are not strictly needed to match the demand (until the next physical boundary) and b) using your own improved tools to improve the results beyond the pure shrinking but instead allowing for quicker design and additional speed-ups should show as super-exponential development. But neither does.
From this I conclude that it is not the technology which is limiting but the demand is (basically).
All this is based on the asummption that there are not too many limiting technological borders. If there were that would suggest lots of steps which might look exponential-like from a distance. I see that there are many small technological improvements but these are not limiting but rather cost-optimizations and thus don’t count for the present analysis.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. This is useful information.