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Semiconductor fabrication history and related legal trends
Semiconductor fabrication history and related legal trends
Gordon Moore, who, along with Robert Noyce, co-founded Intel, hypothesized that the number of transistors on a chip will double approximately every two years. Known as “Moore’s Law,” this projection of exponential growth was not a law of nature. Rather, it was an observation of technology and industry trends. However, for approximately five decades, Moore’s Law roughly held true. This progress brought with it significant reductions in per-unit transistor costs in microchips. However, even as per-unit marginal cost of transistors has dropped, the cost of research and development has skyrocketed. This has driven industry-wide specialization, and ironically, strategic collaboration combined with fierce competition.
Nearly 60 years after it was first hypothesized, Moore’s law now seems to be slowly petering out. But demand for smaller, faster chips continues to grow. With competitors seeking to eke out even more performance from their silicon, the natural trend will be even more specialized chips. Every single gate and every single transistor must be necessary to the chip’s functionality. If not, is removed to make space.
The specialization has driven a clearly observable trend: some technology companies focus on designing modular IP, others use licensing agreements to acquire and incorporate the IP into their chip-level designs, others focus on fabricating those chips, others focus on assembling chips into board-level products, and yet others focus on assembling systems.
At every stage, complex contracts set forth the legal rights and obligations of the parties.
Today, nimble and innovative technology companies cannot survive unless their business plan includes:
A thoroughly-researched strategic plan that carefully takes into account the market and the technology landscape,
A well-designed product that meets market demand by optimizing the state of technology, and
A portfolio of carefully-drawn intellectual property, including patents and technology agreements, strategically drafted to provide maximum protection.
Please feel free to contact us to discuss how we can help your technology company with the third item above.
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Saman Taherian
Lapin & Taherian
Attorneys At Law
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