The Development Law of the IC Industry

Moore’s Law has great significance in the development of integrated circuit industry. In general, we can say that the number of components in IC doubles every 18 to 24 months. As a complement to Moore’s Law, Bell’s Law predicted that by keeping a computer’s capabilities unchanged, the price and volume of the microprocessor would reduce by half in every 18 months. Gene’s Law indicated that the power consumption/performance ratio of DSP reduces by 2 orders of magnitude every 10 years. Metcalfe’s Law states: The value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of network users; that is, N connections can create benefits. Like Moore’s Law, both Gilder’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law are empirical, approximate descriptions and predictions to be validated. Along with the IC development path as forecasted by Moore’s Law, the line width of IC technology is gradually scaled down. In 2023, the IC manufacturing technology is at 3 nm node and entering the scope of mesoscopic physics. There are three constraints for continuous scaling of technology: physical constraints, power consumption constraints, and economic constraints.