114 Inverting the Paradox of Excellence
manufacturing plants that produce these chips. The usable limit for semiconductor process technol-
ogy will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20 nanometers (nm)
to 18 nm nodes. At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor
manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production; that is, their costs will
be so high that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it. Lastly, the power require-
ments of chips are also increasing. More power being equivalent to more heat equivalent to bigger
batteries implies that at some point, it becomes increasingly difcult to power these chips while
putting them on smal ...