Moore’s Law is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law
The automotive industry has an exponentially growing demand for chips, while chip makers struggle with exponential process data growth
Gordon Moore’s 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore’s Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years.
Moore’s Law is the best-known industrial exponential phenomenon, and part of the inspiration for this publication. Upon hearing about the continued chip shortage disrupting automotive vehicle production, I decided to investigate. Two additional exponential phenomenon in the world of semiconductors were uncovered.
First, the automotive industry demand for chips is increasing at an exponential rate. Grand View Research forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 10.7% over the next 10 years ending 2025. This seems reasonable as chips are used in dozens of car subsystems from the powertrain and safety to infotainment accounting for over 30% of the cost of a vehicle. Semiconductor Engineering has an excellent piece on “Improving Automotive Electronic Hardware With SAE J3168”. This is quite timely as Tesla was asked to recall 158,000 vehicles for touchscreen failures as the 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory component wears out after it has been overwritten too many times.
Additionally, the growth of semiconductor fabrication data has eclipsed engineers’ ability to analyze it. The collection of data within manufacturing environments has exploded but there is a critical shortage of engineers and scientists to makes sense of it well-enough to drive improvements back into the process. Partly, this is due to current machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms inability to easily to encode physical, chemical, and biological constraints rendering state of the art algorithms useless to manufacturing engineers. This often leaves manufacturers with only one choice: store the data for a some future date in hopes the tools mature to make the data usable for future insights. But, this data storage and pipelining comes at considerable organizational burden and cost, just like having many external warehouses for housing spare inventory. As the Industry 4.0 data burden grows exponentially, we must figure out how store, analyze, and discard it more effectively or organizations will be overwhelmed very soon.
Video of the Week
Boston Dynamics viral video of its robots dancing to “Do You Love Me” has surely reached you by now. IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman discusses where Atlas got its moves from with Aaron Saunders, Boston Dynamics’ VP of Engineering.
How it Started vs How it’s Going
Credit: High Country News
Explore the history of U.S. railroads with FreightWaves. Nowadays, the U.S. struggles to get new rail projects started on both the East and West coasts. Asia continues to push the boundaries of rail technology with peak speeds of 620 km/h.
The Week in News
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Date: January 11, 2021
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Date: January 11, 2021
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Read more at Bloomberg
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Date: January 14, 2021
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Read more at SME
Surge Demand
Although NASA gives up on taking Mars’ temperature perhaps electron-beam 3D metal printing systems can help humanity overcome space exploration obstacles. Back on Earth, the robots continue to advance with an AI-powered vision system that improves pipe welding automation which doesn’t require constant operator supervision.