We’re not prepared for the end of Moore’s Law (Link)

The cost of a fab is rising at around 13% a year, and is expected to reach $16 billion or more by 2022. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in 2010 and 25 in 2002.

Economists at Stanford and MIT have calculated that the research effort going into upholding Moore’s Law has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971.

A few years ago, leading economists credited the information technology made possible by integrated circuits with a third of US productivity growth since 1974.