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Is it? I was under the impression that we are hitting physical barriers, like transistor size getting closer and closer to Silicon atom size.

It's still technically possible to make chips with smaller nodes than the current mainstream processes allow, although this is uneconomical due to low yields and extremely thin margins.

Has the budget for semiconductor research ever decreased? It's a tautology that we could be spending more money on it, but we are deeply investing in this field in a way that we stopped doing with space.

Right, so "Moore's law is dead" really scoped to "... affordable, conventional materials and designs that we've almost finished wringing every scrap of ROI out of".

(That's not meant to be pejorative. Just saying I understand why companies would be loathe to ditch proven tooling w/ a lot of sunk costs).