SAN FRANCISCO – Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines may have coined his own corollary to Moore's Law: The number of transistors produced per electronics engineer increases by four orders of magnitude every 25 years. 
 
Keynoting SemiCon West this week, Rhines dispelled a number of fallacies that have come to rule the design environment, not the least of which is that rising design costs would slow innovation. Using Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s famous metric charting the number of transistors per chip, Rhines noted that while labor costs are relatively high for electronics engineers, design employment rises roughly 3% per year, a figure that pales against the growth in transistor use. 
 
Rhines’ research also found that the semiconductor market does not mirror the overall economy, showing via regression analyses that semiconductor revenues are independent of the gross domestic product. The results, he said, suggest the former could be sharply up – or down – even if the latter is not.
 
Furthermore, Rhines asserted that the industry is not on the verge of consolidation, noting that market shares among leading suppliers have not fluctuated drastically over the past two decades, even as new players have entered the mix.
 
He added that the semiconductor industry is on the verge of recovery and positioned to outperform other markets.

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