Productivity and Cyclicality in Semiconductors Trends, Implications, and Questions: Report of a Symposium (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Panel III: Economic Growth and Semiconductor Productivity
Panel III: Economic Growth and Semiconductor Productivity
Pages 43-59
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From page 43... ...
3. Differences in semiconductor input price changes across the industry may play a significant role in explaining differences in quality-adjusted price declines across user sectors.
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From page 44... ...
Because lithographic and other advances have produced twice as many features per "technology node" every three years, and the cost of wafer processing has remained roughly constant, the processing cost in dollars per device has shown a compound annual decline rate (CADR) of 21 percent.
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From page 45... ...
All of these conditions, he said, were unlikely to persist, and in the future the rate of price declines was likely to return to the historical rate of minus-40 percent. "This rate of minus-60 percent," he concluded," does not seem to be sustainable." SEMICONDUCTOR PRODUCTIVITY AND COMMUNICATIONS Mark Pinto Agere Dr.
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From page 46... ...
System cost reductions have amounted to 120 percent since 1997 for dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) .19 Scalable DWDM systems are important because they enable service providers to accommodate consumer demand for everincreasing amounts of bandwidth.
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From page 47... ...
By 2002 the smallest wireless handset, a "soft radio," will occupy just 1 cubic inch, with only two ICs.21 He said a single small card would be able to carry both a wireless local area network connection and a GPS device. He mentioned also high data rate wireless communications as an example of "where could we go." One version is known as BLAST, for Bell Labs Layered Space-Time, an architecture for realizing very high data rates over fading wireless channels.22 This uses a compact antenna array and is the same size as a palmheld portable device.
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From page 48... ...
Rapid Evolution of Optical Networking He then discussed the evolution of optical networking, which has been rapid. Between 1996 and 2002 it had been changing: from WDM transmission, to WDM transmission with the ability to add or drop signals, to WDM rings with node addressing, to WDM rings with full connectivity, and finally to interconnected rings and mesh topologies.
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From page 49... ...
Applications in the foreseeable future are likely to include high-performance computing, virtual conferencing, faster and more intelligent networks, ubiquitous sensing and computing, games and entertainment, interconnected intelligent appliances, and better human interfaces. SEMICONDUCTOR PRODUCTIVITY AND COMPUTERS Randall D
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From page 50... ...
Since 1994 the curve toward smaller size has become steeper, partly because the transition to deep ultraviolet lithography was easier than first thought. It was also accompanied by significant innovations, such as the chemically amplified photo resist, optical proximity correction, off-axis illumination, and additional elements.
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From page 51... ...
This series uses a 175-sq-mm chip with 47 million transistors and seven layers of copper interconnect. It has been possible to run a 1-gigahertz processor on a 20-way system with enough productivity to put two processors on a single chip.
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From page 52... ...
Because the processing cost per unit area had increased slowly, there was tremendous economic pressure to reduce chip size. The number of transistors was supposed to follow Moore's Law closely, doubling every 18 months, but the doubling time for microprocessors has been closer to 1.9 years.
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From page 53... ...
The root cause of the problem was that the technology did not follow classical scaling. As a result the power density, due to technology alone, had actually risen not by the predicted factor of three but by a factor of 10.
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At one point, 27 server farms were proposed for south King County, Washington, where they would require as much energy as Seattle. In Santa Clara, California, a single communications company applied for permission to build a 250-megawatt power plant to power its server farm.
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The supercomputer roadmap shows a progression over the years, as follows: · use slower processors with much greater power efficiency; · scale the technology to desired performance with parallel systems; · design workload scaling efficiency to sustain power efficiency; and · keep physical distances small to use less communication power. One of the productivity challenges in the future, said Dr.
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From page 56... ...
The price data for communications equipment are also incomplete, including only central office switching equipment and omitting routers, transmission gear, and fiber optics. Nonetheless, to an economist this was a dramatic story, since economists expect price indexes to rise, not fall.
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Productivity growth was relatively rapid in the postwar period, from 1948 to 1973, and IT did not have a very important role. After 1973 productivity grew slowly, by about 0.25 percent per year, but by then the predominant share belonged to IT.
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From page 58... ...
Those who side with the conservative faction behind the roadmap exercise and assume a reversion to a three-year cycle beginning around 2003 can expect the rate of acceleration of productivity to return to previous levels. The most recent surge in economic growth was not sustainable, because this included an extraordinary gain in the labor force as unemployment declined from 7.3 percent to 4 percent.
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From page 59... ...
Telecom equipment was included in the national accounts, as it had been for many years, but the prices did not include fiber optics, which is fundamental to the future of the industry. He concluded with a call for more and better data in order to assist a better understanding of the nation's productivity and growth.
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