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Measuring and Sustaining the New Economy Report of a Workshop (2002) / Chapter Skim
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Semiconductors: The Arrival of the New Economy
Pages 62-68

The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
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From page 62...
... Early semiconductor manufacturers polished the wafers and then processed them on vacuum equipment they bought and adapted themselves. Today the semiconductor equipment business alone is about a $50 billion business and the materials business is worth a little less than half of that.
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From page 63...
... Spencer, are what will happen if that productivity growth begins to taper off and what can be done to perpetuate the growth. He showed a graph, used by the Dell Company, of cumulative DRAM production versus cost DRAM prices per bit in real dollars (Figure 6~.
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From page 64...
... television and consumer electronics businesses into near extinction. NACS organized Microtech 2000, and one of their boldest proposals was to leap one whole level of technology to move directly to 1-gigabit memories by the year 2000.
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From page 65...
... The international roadmap predicts that this pace will continue to the year 2003 and then perhaps return to its previous three-year pace (Figure 7~. The Question of Physical Limits for Semiconductors The plan for International SEMATECH, whose members represent 50-60 percent of the semiconductor business worldwide, is to try to stay on the two-year cycle.
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From page 66...
... He closed his talk by revisiting but declining to answer the thorny question of when we will reach physical limits that begin to restrain semiconductor growth. Silicon CMOS, the dominant semiconductor technology today, should support traditional productivity growth in the industry for the next five to ten years.
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From page 67...
... He said that fiber optics was another example. He also mentioned software productivity: that increased computing power and low-cost memory allowed new, efficient ways to
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From page 68...
... Thus, the future of information technology would depend not only on semiconductor productivity but also on major jumps in other technologies. The Challenge of Finding Real Value in Technology Bill Raduchel observed that the most interesting problem over the next decade rests not so much in creating new technology but in figuring out how to do something useful with it.
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Key Terms

  • productivity growth
  • semiconductor business
  • finer lines
  • feature size
  • magnetic memory

  • disk drives
  • internet access
  • personal computer
  • semiconductor roadmap
  • yield improvement

  • physical limits
  • university representatives
  • cycle instead
  • boldest proposals
  • achieved six

  • equipment changes
  • technology makes
  • mentioned software
  • traditional productivity
  • communications technology

  • memory allowed
  • sufficient processor
  • etching finer
  • change outmoded
  • model predicted

  • prices dropped
  • factors slowing
  • business practices
  • percent annually
  • cumulative dram


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