Beating Moore’s Law: How Semiconductor Companies Can Reduce Costs AND Keep Innovating Every 18 months

Everyone knows about the phenomenal progress of innovation in the semiconductor industry. The law driving this is known both in the industry and colloquially as Moore’s Law. It states that microchips will double their computing power every 18 months. Basically, that means that the number of circuit parts that can be crammed into a space will double in 18 months. This translates into smaller and smaller parts which require cleaner and cleaner spaces to manufacture. Making a clean enough space for nanometer size parts to be manufactured on a large scale requires near perfect vacuums. Making this possible on Earth requires large energy intensive vacuum pumps and stringent handling procedures. To top it off, the yield for these ever smaller chips decreases due to difficulty of preventing contaminants from coming in. This all combines to skyrocketing fixed costs and a diminishing ability to recover the investment due the bad yields. Add to that, the chips being manufactured become obsolete within 18 months, and due to the poor yields never reach their full potential sales.

This trend has forced many semiconductor companies to become either “fabless”; basically outsourcing their manufacturing to companies specialized in only manufacturing, or make alliances with competitors to survive cost increases. However, even these measures are beginning to have diminished effects as chips come into the nanometer range, with manufacturers spending large amounts of money to try to increase yields and maintain quality.

How can a company free itself from this burden? The only way is to solve the root problem of creating a clean environment cheaply. Fortunately, the cleanest environment in the universe exists a short five hundred miles away from any part of the planet. That environment is space. Low earth orbit offers an environment that is a thousand times cleaner than the cleanest clean room on Earth. And, it’s available for free. Semiconductor companies can get rid of its bulky hardware required to maintain clean rooms on Earth. They can have the freedom to innovate and manufacture smaller chips without having to worry about making a cleaner environment. Companies that choose this option can freely out-innovate the competition without having to worry about whether their chip can be manufactured.