Semiconductor Fabrication

When naysayers challenge the wisdom of the half-century-old Moore's Law, they bring up design difficulties and the inevitable limits of physics. Yet even in the absence of such limitations, the cost of these technological advances has exploded in recent years. Building a fab costs in the billions of dollars, and price pressures on the devices that come out of it make recouping those costs a long-term gamble, at best. How will industry respond to the situation? Will we continue to seek the exalted performance that the next device generation can give us? What applications will demand capabilities that we cannot yet achieve?

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