Few got a ringside seat to the immense financial risks that surround chipmaking from its beginning as good as Arthur Rock’s. Instrumental in obtaining work for the team of engineering managers who “betrayed” transistor pioneer Williams Shockley in the late 1950s, Rock again helped some of them set up Intel a decade later and helped develop what sometimes gets called Moore’s Second Law.
The corollary of the more famous law, Rock observed that the cost of fitting out a semiconductor fab doubles every four years. He identified in the late-1990s that the bill had risen to $12m from just $12,000 in the late 1960s. Today’s, it’s well north of $12bn.
Even a single lithographic scanner, used to define circuit images one layer on one wafer every 30 seconds or so, costs in the order of $200m and that will increase in just a couple of years to more than $350m. You need ten of these, plus a bunch of scanners based on older but cheaper technology, to sustain the...