Semiconductor industry roadmap to abandon pursuit of Moore's law for the first time as computing becomes increasingly mobile
The chips are down for Moore's law — The semiconductor industry will soon abandon its pursuit of Moore's law. Now things could get a lot more interesting.
Context & Ripple Effects
The industry's official roadmap has tracked Moore's law for decades; this is the first time it formally stops chasing it. The move ratifies what engineers were already saying in late 2015, when attention shifted to new approaches beyond transistor scaling as Dennard-style gains ran out.
The timing tracks the demand side: computing is going mobile, where battery life and integration matter more than raw clock speed, so the roadmap's definition of progress changes rather than dies.
First-order effects
- Chipmakers lose the shared yardstick that coordinated R&D roadmaps across the supply chain — each firm now justifies process investment on workload-specific grounds instead of node-to-node shrink.
- Mobile becomes the reference design point for the industry, reordering which process features get funded.
Second-order effects
- Without free speedups from shrinking, performance gains migrate into architecture: the slowdown directly fed the rise of specialized silicon like FPGAs and GPUs for AI and other fixed workloads.
- Tooling bets intensify around the remaining scaling levers — leading chipmakers weighing EUV lithography for mass production are buying the last of the shrink economics at far higher cost per tool.
Third-order effects
- If the SIA projection holds that transistors stop shrinking by 2021, density gains shift to stacking and vertical packing while post-silicon candidates such as graphene and other 2D materials move from labs toward flexible-electronics niches first.
- Industry structure consolidates around whoever can afford both EUV-class capex and custom-architecture teams, squeezing out players that competed purely on process leadership.
The trend: Semiconductor progress is decoupling from transistor scaling and reorganizing around mobile-first workloads, specialized architectures, and eventually new materials.