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>MOS is just hard

I think the important point is that "MOS scales". All the bipolar technologies never had anything like Dennard scaling, which was the backbone of Moores Law.

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Case in point, you could get bipolar ECL RAM in the 80s with access times of around 1-2 ns (which is at least four times faster than the fastest DDR-SDRAM in 2020). Except those things would have a few kilobits at most and burn a Watt or two; an entire 16 GB stick of DDR4 doesn't require much more than that. (This is SRAM of course; you can't build good DRAM on a bipolar process, and MOS SRAM is much faster than DRAM as well. However, MOS SRAM in the 80s would have access times of 20-150 ns; it's typically the suffix of the part number, e.g. 62256-70)

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