[ejiblabahaba]

I don't agree with the premise.

Integrated circuit manufacturing scales well because the cost per transistor is lower with every process improvement, so as process improvements accumulate, more value (or perhaps more productivity) per wafer is created. This strictly applies to digital circuitry - most analog circuitry requires a certain geometry or process technology not available on a massively optimized modern digital process. While some analog technology improvements are made, it's at a much slower pace. Moreover, a lot of analog redesigns come about as a means to abandon older, less cost-effective semiconductor technology - so the argument that cheap older tech is a boon to any industry outside of limited volume and high cost R&D is suspicious.

Solar cost improvements are in large part a function of massive economies of scale coupled with cheap manufacturing costs and government subsidies from the primary country of origin (which country? Take a guess). I'm sure there's been improvements in a handful of solar material designs, but if you make a large enough volume of panels in a country with cheap labor and massive government subsidies, costs go down. It's not rocket science. To the extent that modern semiconductor technology has improved solar, maybe an argument can be made for improved digital inverter controllers and for silicon carbide FETs maturing enough to make high-voltage panels efficient and ubiquitous at grid-scale deployments. But it's mostly volume, cheap labor costs, and government subsidies.

I don't know about biotech. The following is speculation. I think a lot of biotech was feasible 25 years ago in terms of manufacturability of microfluidics or molecular identification circuitry; but the cost of mass manufacture, and particularly the compute requirements to quickly recover signal from a highly noisy process, wasn't economical or simple to build until digital signal processing and general purpose compute became cheap and fast enough to integrate alongside the biosensors, often as copackaged modules, or generic coprocessors (ARM, RISC-V, etc) that can be built on a ton of different processes and which export raw sensor data quickly enough to allow much heavier duty professors to do the bulk of the work.

I think actual fabrication tech improves slowly, because at its core it's chemistry and material science which also improves slowly (see: batteries). Digital circuitry is a mind-blowing exception, thanks to the incredible amount of usable abstractions that can be built from the manufacture of two specific transistor recipes. But digital circuitry is so powerful, it becomes possible to abstract away massive chunks of otherwise difficult problems in software, firmware, or dedicated transistor-level algorithm implementations, which reduces the amount of physical-world improvements needed to make useful innovations.