The inventor of Moore's law and a co-founder of Intel spoke recently of the loss of competitive advantage in Silicon Valley that offers either a warning or opportunity for NEO, highlighted with "Other areas have picked up on the technology - it's spread around to a lot of other places", "We have very formidable competition in the world. I think the
impact of China is just beginning to be felt," and "Chief among the challenges ahead for Silicon Valley is the
relative weakness of the U.S. public education system, which Moore
characterized as a problem for the entire country."

Intel founder: Silicon Valley no longer unique

By Robert McMillan

The region that gave birth to such legendary high technology startups
as Apple Computer Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Cisco Systems Inc. may
be seeing some of its influence wane, Gordon Moore, one of the founders
of Intel Corp., said Wednesday.

Though Silicon Valley was once unparalleled as the
natural home of high technology startups, things have changed in the
nearly 40 years since Moore, along with Robert Noyce and Andy Grove
founded Intel. "It's uniqueness is not as great as it was in the
beginning. Other areas have picked up on the technology," Moore said of
the region. "Now it's spread around to a lot of other places."

China, for example, is fast rising as a technology player, he
said. "We have very formidable competition in the world. I think the
impact of China is just beginning to be felt," he said. "China is
training 10 times as many engineers. ... Their technology is catching
up fairly rapidly. It's a very entrepreneurial society."

Chief among the challenges ahead for Silicon Valley is the
relative weakness of the U.S. public education system, which Moore
characterized as a problem for the entire country, and the San
Francisco Bay Area's notoriously high cost of living, both which are
making it harder to attract top workers. "It's so damned expensive,
especially the housing. It's hard to move young people in."

The median price paid for a Bay Area home was US$534,000 in
January, according to real estate research firm DataQuick Information
Systems Inc.

But Moore did express a qualified faith in both the region and
the country that had given birth to his company. "Silicon Valley is
still a great place to start a company," he said. "I expect the U.S.
will still be a successful player, but I don't think it will enjoy the
position it's had in the past 20 years."

Moore's comments came Wednesday, at a press event to honor the
40th anniversary of the April 1965 Electronics magazine article that
first articulated Moore's famous law on the rate of growth in the chip
industry. Originally, a somewhat obscure prediction that the number of
components on an integrated circuit would continue to double every
year, Moore's Law has come to be regarded as an article of faith in an
industry that has defined itself with rapid growth. In 1975, Moore
updated his law to predict that components would double every two
years.

Though he was at first embarrassed that his observation had
become an industry rule -- "it was (in) a McGraw Hill publication that
we described as one of the throwaway journals," he said Wednesday --
Moore eventually grew more comfortable with his status as a lawmaker.
"Gradually, I got to accept it. It was shorthand for showing what the
technology allowed you to do."

With the dimensions of chip components now being measured in
atoms, it seems that the ability of engineers to keep doubling the
number of transistors they put on chips may now be in jeopardy. But on
Wednesday, Moore warned against writing off his famous maxim before its
time. "I've never been able to see more than two or three (product)
generations ahead without seeing something that appeared to be an
impenetrable barrier there," he said.

For example, the 90 nanometer process technology commonly used
by chipmakers today once seemed an impossibility, Moore said. "I
remember the time that I thought 1 micron was probably going to be the
limit," he said. "It wasn't a barrier at all." There are 1,000 nm in a
micron, which represents one millionth of a meter.

Though Moore stopped short Wednesday of predicting that his law
would hold for another 40 years, he pointed out that it has continually
defied a more pessimistic maxim. "Moore's Law is a violation of
Murphy's Law," he said. "Everything gets better as you make things
smaller."

Posted March 11, 2005 04:45 PM |