![\"Airspeed](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/20110726-Airspeed_trend5.jpg\" "\\"Airspeed")
<\/p>\nAnalogies with Moore\u2019s Law abound. Virtually any trend looks linear on a log-linear plot if the time period is short enough. Some people hopefully compare their industry\u2019s recent history to Moore\u2019s Law, wishfully predicting future success with the air of inevitability that is usually attached to Moore\u2019s Law. Others look to some past trend in the hopes of understanding the future of Moore\u2019s Law. A common analogy of the latter sort is the trend of airplane speed in the last century. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Plotting the cruising speed of new planes against their first year of commercial use, the trend from the 1910s to the 1950s was linear on a log-scale, just like a Moore\u2019s Law plot. But then something different happens. As airspeed approaches the speed of sound, the trend levels off \u2013 a physical limit changed the economics of air travel. The equivalent of Moore\u2019s Law for air travel had ended.<\/p>\n
For me, the interesting data point is the Concord Supersonic Transport (SST). First flown commercially in 1976, the Mach 2 jet was perfectly in line with the historical log-speed trend of the first 50 years of the industry. And the SST was a technical success \u2013 it did everything that was expected of it. Except, of course, make money. The economic limit had been reached, but that didn\u2019t stop many bright people from insisting that the trend must continue, spending billions to make it so. But technological invention couldn\u2019t change the economic picture, and supersonic transportation never caught on.<\/p>\n
So here goes my analogy. I think extreme ultraviolet (EUV) will be the SST of lithography. I have little doubt that the technology can be made to work. If it fails (I hope it won\u2019t, but I think it will), the failure will be economic. Like the SST, EUV lithography will never be economical to operate in a mass (manufacturing) market. We can do it, but that doesn\u2019t mean we should.<\/p>\n
Of course, this analogy is imperfect, as all such analogies are. Air travel went through just three doublings of speed in 50 years, as opposed to the 36 doublings of transistor count per chip in the last 50 years of semiconductor manufacturing. And the economics of the industries are hardly the same. Still, the analogy has enough weight to make one think. We\u2019ll know soon enough \u2013 EUV lithography will likely succeed or fail in the next two years.<\/p>\n
As an aside, the first time I heard someone mention the analogy between airspeed and transistor trends was in the early 1990s, when Richard Freeman of AT&T gave a talk. The subject of his presentation? Soft x-ray lithography, what we now call EUV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Analogies with Moore\u2019s Law abound. Virtually any trend looks linear on a log-linear plot if the time period is short enough. Some people hopefully compare their industry\u2019s recent history to Moore\u2019s Law, wishfully predicting future success with the air of inevitability that is usually attached to Moore\u2019s Law. Others look to some past trend in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microlithography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":364,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions\/364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}