Semi, San Jose, Calif., reports that April 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law. In April 1965, Gordon Moore, later co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits would continue to double every year. At the time, hundreds of transistors per IC were cutting edge, compared with 1.3 billion today.
His observation has set the exponential tempo for five decades of innovation and investment resulting in today’s $336 billion integrated circuits industry.
Semi, the global industry association serving the nano- and micro-electronic manufacturing supply chains, today recognizes the enabling contributions made by the over 1900 Semi member companies in developing semiconductor equipment and materials that produce over 219 billion integrated circuit devices and 766 billion semiconductor units per year (WSTS, 2014).
Semi member companies now routinely produce materials such as process gases, for example, to levels of 99.994 percent quality for bulk Silane (SiH4) in compliance with the SEMI C3.55 Standard. Semiconductor equipment manufacturers develop the hundreds of processing machines necessary for each IC factory (fab) that are at work all day, every day, processing more than 100 silicon wafers per hour with fully automated delivery and control all with standardized interoperability. SEMI Member companies provide the equipment to inspect wafer process results automatically, and find and identify defects at sizes only fractions of the 14nm circuit line elements in todays chips, ensuring process integrity throughout the manufacturing process.
“It was SEMI Member companies who enabled Moore’s Law’s incredible exponential growth over the last 50 years,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. ”Whereas hundreds of transistors on an IC was noteworthy in the 1960s, today over 1.3 billion transistors are on a single IC. Semi member companies provide the capital equipment and materials for today’s mega-fabs, with each one processing hundreds or thousands of ICs on each wafer, and more than 100,000 wafers processed per month.”
To celebrate, Semi has produced a series of Infographics on its website that show the progression of the industry.
