DV Hardware bringing you the hottest news about processors, graphics cards, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, ATi, hardware and technology!

While further advances in shrinking process geometries can be achieved after the 20- to 18-nm nodes, the rising cost of chip-making equipment will relegate Moore's Law to the laboratory and alter the fundamental economics of the semiconductor industry, iSuppli (El Segundo, Calif.) predicted.

"At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it," said Len Jelinek, director and chief semiconductor manufacturing iSuppli, in a statement.

But according to In-Stat's chief technology strategist, Jim McGregor, a lot of companies are facing financial difficulty at the moment due to over expansion in the industry and the general economy, and this "has nothing to do with this argument."

McGregor told the INQ, "even Gordon Moore has predicted the end of Moore's Law twice, but he was wrong both times." Reassuring indeed.

According to McGregor, Moore's Law - the observation that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years - is "a key fundamental driver of the industry from an economics perspective." Future challenges, says McGregor emphatically, will most likely be down to technology issues rather than equipment costs, so Isuppli is spouting nonsense.