Moore’s Law – the key to a sustainable Sweden?
For Sweden to remain strong – both as an innovative nation and cohesive society – a wide range of stakeholders must come together to agree on common goals. To achieve this without compromising vigorous economic competition or democratic processes, we should draw inspiration from the semiconductor industry, which has taken Moore’s Law as a guiding principle for decades.
Moore’s Law shows how we can work together to meet Sweden’s long-term challenges
The ambition to build a green and digital society is crucial for Sweden as a global leader in technology and innovation. But it creates huge coordination challenges for the country’s various stakeholder groups, for example, about essential investments in the country’s energy system that are capital-intensive, long-term, and irreversible. Our politics operates in four-year cycles, while technical systems develop over decades or in sudden leaps. While all stakeholders are interdependent, they follow no single, long-term plan. This brings the risk of erratic decision-making, which leads to the ambitious goals of one government being shelved by the next, investments failing or being delayed, and technology and society adapting at different rates to developments like artificial intelligence (AI).
How can we as a society reconcile these often-conflicting forces and interests so that, despite all the uncertainty involved, we can – democratically and collectively – focus our attention on the national effort required to ensure our future? How can we make that future more predictable, for example, by making long-term, capital-intensive investments feasible, regardless of whether they are meant to boost our capacity in AI, medicine, quantum computing, renewable energy, or defence technology?
Fortunately, a model already exists for guiding the long-term development of a complex and innovative ecosystem in a global context. Over the last seven decades, the international semiconductor industry has developed rapidly, thanks to a large number of stakeholders embracing shared goals and a common understanding of what is required to achieve them.
Their vision for their business was based on Moore’s Law, which, despite its name, is more of an observation. In the early years of microelectronics, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubled roughly every two years, while the cost per transistor fell. In practice, Moore’s Law implied exponential increases in chip performance, falling cost per calculation, improved energy efficiency, and ever more powerful electronics of ever smaller scale. In other words, it simply and clearly described the forces that would forge digital society.
Thanks to its widespread acceptance across the industry, the trend Moore described, though never a law of nature, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its articulation fostered a sense of optimism and confidence in the future, creating a collective belief in technological revolution that endures today.
Despite fierce competition between manufacturers, equipment suppliers and materials companies, the global semiconductor industry has remarkably managed to remain true to its ambitious vision for seven decades. It has done so in the face of recurring doubts. I have followed this discussion closely for over thirty years. Continued performance gains and miniaturisation have presented increasingly serious technical and even physical difficulties – and yet new solutions have always been found.
This success was made possible by an institutional innovation known as the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which has now been succeeded by the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS). ITRS/IRDS is a nothing less than a joint plan to allow the industry to coordinate technological progress across companies and countries, for example, by introducing a new generation of manufacturing technology so that the computing power of chips can maintain the desired trajectory. It identifies technical bottlenecks, research challenges, physical limits, and system dependencies – and coordinates when new manufacturing equipment needs to be introduced, what performance can be expected from new chips at a given time, what investments need to be made.
The roadmap is not a detailed plan for steering industrial policy, but rather a shared framework. It defines issues that must be resolved collectively – for example, developing next-generation lithography technology or overcoming material challenges – while allowing each stakeholder to choose which specific solution to adopt. In doing so, it reduces investment uncertainty, enabling both large and small equipment makers, chip manufacturers and research organisations to plan for the long term. This approach increases efficiency and reduces risks, while opening the door to new players and encouraging innovation.
Crucially, all collaboration focuses on so-called pre-competitive issues, which require stakeholders to look 10-15 years into the future. Roadmap work is coordinated by a neutral, non-commercial body that convenes working groups of volunteers and experts, drawn from both large and small companies as well as academia and other organisations. Participation is driven by the belief that Moore’s Law will hold true and that it is necessary to keep up with the times. There is a strong commitment to ensuring that all work is based on facts and the laws of physics. Quality is maintained by peer review, with the working groups evaluating each other’s conclusions from a systemic perspective.
Resilient societies combine autonomy, democracy, sustainability, technology, equality and prosperity, as Mats Benner and Sylvia Schwaag Serger emphasise in their introduction to these essays – and all of these elements play important roles in the semiconductor industry’s implementation of its roadmap.
The ability to take action arises from a shared understanding of systemic constraints and possibilities. Democracy, in this context, is embodied by transparent processes in which arguments are knowledge-based, and expertise is more important than status or organisational affiliation. Sustainability becomes a crucial design parameter when energy consumption, material usage and manufacturing methods are systematically analysed. Equality is strengthened when even smaller companies and research organisations gain access to the same forward-looking information as large corporations. Prosperity is promoted when research efforts are directed towards identified bottlenecks and when investment risk is reduced through long-term planning horizons.
The societal challenges Sweden is currently facing highlight the potential benefits of adopting this approach. Solving the climate crisis requires major systematic improvements within a short time. The use of fossil fuels and carbon-dioxide emissions must quickly be halved and then halved again several times over, down to virtually zero. The rate of recycling and reusing materials as diverse as rare minerals and building materials must be raised significantly. Transitions of this magnitude need long-term coordination, investment, and innovation – which means they need a shared roadmap.
The energy sector is a case in point. A long-term, national energy roadmap does not determine which technologies to prioritise – hydrogen over battery storage, wind power over nuclear power, centralised over decentralised energy production. It identifies energy bottlenecks and describes possible solutions and potential consequences. Which technologies will be available in three, five or ten years’ time? When would investments in energy grids, storage and energy production have to be made? Where is there a need for more research? How would economic resilience be affected? Which material flows could become critical? Such a roadmap does not replace democratic decision-making by prescribing political priorities. Rather, its detailed analysis of the range of possible future pathways provides a firm foundation for evidence-based political and economic decisions.
The objection that political frameworks still influence the outcome is correct but not decisive. Subsidies, taxation and regulation, for example, influence which solutions appear most attractive. A roadmap is a prerequisite for developing an action plan. It makes the consequences of different decisions visible, shows which solutions are technically possible or economically viable, which are constrained by the laws of physics – and which depend on policy decisions. It allows us to assess how different choices would affect the system.
One particularly attractive aspect of the ITRS model is that it promotes equality of opportunity and democratic access in technological development. Participation in the working groups is not restricted to the industry’s dominant players, but is equally open to individual researchers, small companies and other organisations, regardless of their location. The driving force behind this openness is the aim of accessing the best expertise and the most innovative contributors. The result is that all industry stakeholders have access to the same information and planning horizon.
So what might a systematic, national approach involving roadmaps and similar action plans look like? A first step would be to identify priority areas suitable for roadmaps. The energy sector is an obvious example, others could include the construction sector, the responsible development of artificial intelligence, or biomaterial flows linked to sustainable agriculture and forestry.
A critical first step would be to agree on a common goal, such as a specific rate for reducing the share of fossil energy in the Swedish energy system. The ensuing work would be done in a neutral arena, by individuals chosen for their knowledge, not organisational affiliation. Contributors should be experts in their fields, not representatives of industry or other interest groups – and legal, social and liberal-arts perspectives should also play a role. The selection process should be open, recurring and subject to continuous review. Furthermore, voters and the business community would have to demand that their political representatives observe the roadmaps and respect the goals they set.
The roadmap approach is particularly important for Sweden, a small, export-dependent economy with strong technological clusters. While its innovation ecosystems are strong, they are often fragmented. Universities, government agencies, companies and start-ups do collaborate, but typically on a project basis and within relatively short time horizons. ITRS and IDRS demonstrate the value of long-term, coordinated roadmaps that extend across decades rather than mere electoral cycles.
Another central lesson from Moore’s Law and the development of semiconductors is the importance of institutional continuity. ITRS was not a one-off project, but a continuous process with structured follow-up, which later evolved to become the IRDS. In a Swedish context, this would mean creating permanent coordination forums, in which industry, academia and the public sector – small and large players alike – would jointly and democratically formulate and revise strategic technology goals. This would not be detailed state control, but strategic coordination that reduces uncertainty and enables joint investment. This is particularly important given today’s geopolitical context, which has reduced the scope for global coordination. Swedish roadmaps need to be robust and address national needs, while remaining flexible and integrated with European initiatives.
Experience from the semiconductor industry shows that even highly competitive environments allow national and global stakeholders to coordinate their long-term orientation, without impeding innovation. The scale of the challenges that can be solved in this way is astonishing and encouraging.
Sweden – a highly educated country with a strong democratic tradition and capacity for cooperation – is well placed to draw inspiration from this example. We, too, can foster empowerment through knowledge, equality through transparency, and stability through a long-term perspective. In doing so, we can lay the foundations for democratic decisions grounded in facts and scientific principles.
Heiner Linke
