Semiconductors face the '80s: Seven leaders of the boomingest business in the U.S. prognosticate the problems supergrowth could lead to

Gordon Moore, president of Intel, put it succinctly: “By 1986, the semiconductor industry could be producing something of the order of 10
¹⁴
functions per year. Who will use it all?” He, and 800 other participants in a recent colloquium in California's Silicon Valley, organized by the Santa Clara Chapter of IEEE's Electron Devices Society, heard some attempts at answers from industry leaders. But Dr. Moore was not satisfied. The rate of growth is such, he told Spectrum in a follow-up interview, that if the industry stays on its present upward curve of producing functions and tries to solve its problems as it always has in the past — by lowering prices — there will come a time in the 1980s when it could face disruption and a significant drop in revenues. “And that,” he says, “despite exciting new markets on the horizon, in an otherwise blossoming economy, could be a disaster.”