On Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:03:29 PM UTC-4, wrote:


You really like to lie, Trader. I said semiconductors in general are

in freefall, not just highly integrated semiconductors.

Here are your exact words:


"The cost of all electronics is in free-fall. ...not just
$/transistor. "


Notice the words "all electronics" and "free-fall".




Not all

components are.

Which is what I told you about 6 posts ago.




Some a *highly* specialized so are at a premium. Each

class of semiconductors is certainly dropping in price constantly.



That isn't true either. There are common, mature semiconductors,
that are still being used today, that aren't dropping in
price constantly because there is no way to decrease the
cost. You can still buy an 8031 microcontroller, for example.
It's the most popular microcontroller in the world. It's
been used in everything from cars to business phones.
They hit ~$1 more than a decade ago. Again, the driving trend
where you get steep "free-fall" price drop curves is due to Moore's Law and while that applies to chips where you can continue to shrink the feature size, reduce the die size, it doesn't apply to mature
ICs like the 8031. Hasn't for a long, long time. 7400 type
logic is still used, diodes, discrete transistors, common op
amps, you think the price of those are in a "free-fall"?







The large price drops over time are typically



in either new technology



that is initially very expensive and then drops off as it



gets into high volume production, an example being LCD panels.



Or in the application of Moore's



Law, where you can pack more transistors onto a given size



piece of silicon.







Irrelevant. Because one area is falling faster than another doesn't



mean the bottom isn't dropping out of both.

Again, note the claim that the "bottom is dropping out".
Which of course now you're trying to weasel away from.





The fact is that it's



getting cheaper to process silicon.





That is just flat out wrong.



You're an idiot, Trader. I've been in the business for 40 years.

*EVERYTHING* is cheaper.



And now you're back to making the original claim again.
Boy are you confused. And as always, when you've lost an argument, you start with the name calling.


Still waiting for an explanation of if all electronics
is in a "free-fall", why is the most common of all power
control semiconductor applications, the electronic SCR
based light dimmer, still $15? It was $15 in the 80's.
It's still $15 today. Not what I'd call a "free fall".
Why is an 8051 microcontroller or a 7400 series chip
the same price it was 10 years ago?


And how in the hell could you expect a generator to include
an inverter, when a 6KW inverter sells for about the same
as a basic 6KW generator to begin with? That shows how in
touch you are. Yes, the price of
most power semiconductors has come down in price. But they
aren't in a "free-fall", not declining anywhere near the
rate of semiconductors like memory or CPUs. That's because
the latter two benefit greatly from Moore's Law. It's
what's driving the steep price decreases. Power semiconductors
have benefitted from new advances that have contributed
to price decreases over the years, but they can't benefit
from the "free-fall" you see due to Moore's Law. And it
takes more than just power semiconductors to build an inverter.