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Moore's Law: Costs
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From an economic point of view, Moore's Law was a rather fascinating law. It implied that the development of integrated circuits was completely determined by manufacturing costs. Moore's Law, therefore, defines a completely new economy. In this economy, demand is infinite.
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Put into practice, Moore's Law spells out a way for companies to enhance their products at a rapid clip. Eighteen years ago, Michael Douglas, in the movie "Wall Street," spoke on a cell phone that was about the size and shape of a brick. Shrinkage and integration has lead to phones with television tuners, 7-megapixel cameras and MP3 players. Declining costs have ... put them in the hands of billions of people.
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The economic versions of Moore's Law, therefore, essentially claim that "you get more by less." They ... claim that this change is exponential, usually specifying 18 months as the time it takes for computing power to double at a constant price. This extension, therefore, brings in theoretical and empirical elements that did not exist in the previously discussed versions of the Law. Instead of counting transistors on a chip or benchmarking the number of instructions that a microprocessor or a computer system handles in a unit of time, the cost of computing involves prices.
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Economy, in at least one area, has had to give in order to sustain the continued exponential growth of Moore's Law. That area is the initial capital required to make a modern microchip-manufacturing plant, currently on the order of $1.5 - $2 billion (US dollars). Research and development costs to push Moore's Law past photolithography are likely to be on the same order of cost, if not several times larger. But as the demand increases for computing power used for a variety of applications, it is very likely that the necessary supply will be created to meet that demand.
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Draper Fisher Jurvetson has been investing in a variety of companies like BinOptics, Coatue, Cognigine, FlexICs, and Nantero that are working on the next paradigm shift to extend Moore's law beyond 2017. One near-term extension to Moore's law focuses on the cost side of the equation. Imagine rolls of wallpaper embedded with inexpensive transistors. FlexICs deposits traditional transistors on plastic at room temperature, a much cheaper process than growing and cutting crystalline silicon ingots.
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HMP (Host Media Processing) is a concept rising in popularity among telephony board vendors over the past year -- boosted by VoIP and Moore's law. Both network connectivity and media processing issues can be resolved by a software solution, freeing the developers of computer telephony applications from the inconvenience and cost of specialized hardware parts.
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