Cost Of Technology

Recently, I tried to make a point about the cost of rolling products being a detriment to product change. I was more optimistic than I thought. Here's something from today's EETimes on the costs of innovation. I was way low. Even disk drive vendors figure $30-50 million to bring out a new drive. Change is done to survive, not to satisfy some marketing whim. Billy Quote from: http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=198701495 In the new IC world order, fewer integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) can afford to build fabs, while only an elite group may be able to develop leading-edge IC designs over time. At the 45-nm node, a new 300-mm fab costs about $3 billion, process technology R&D runs $2.4 billion and a "mask set" is up to $9 million, Synopsys said. Test costs, meanwhile, continue to be flat. IC design costs range between $20 million and $50 million, the EDA company estimated. And there's a new problem on the block: process variation. Identified as one of the new "pressure points" at the 45-nm node, variation is becoming one of the root causes of chip failures. Much of the data is uncertain for the 32-nm node and beyond, but some say that by then, a new 300-mm fab could go for $10 billion, as process R&D costs reach $3 billion and design costs $75 million.