Manufacturing Ultimately Drives Moore's First Law
The follow up to this conclusion is that as you continue to shrink the process—getting fine and finer line tracings and so on—the equipment need to control this and make it happen needs to get more and more precise. Which in turn means that each generation of manufacturing machines will cost more than the prior one.
For example, at HP we've shifted from using light to ultraviolet light to try to get better resolution on making the chip traces. This is because ultraviolet light has a shorter wavelength, allowing you to more accurately measure and produce these traces. Whenever you make a major shift to change and improve the line widths that you can produce on the chip, you basically have to build ...
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