Everything over the last years tells me we are very close to the end game in chip production.<p>1. power stopped scaling<p>2. clocks stopped - 4x over 20 years?<p>3. node names became fiction.<p>4. EUV now differentiates the top from everyone else.<p>5. IPC improvements are a trickle.<p>6. Tons of non-moores law ideas are here:<p>A) GPUs<p>B) chiplets<p>C) stacked die<p>D) specialized accelerators<p>7. Governments are now involved in dividing up the tech. Since its finally mature / done.<p>It has been incredible to watch the progression over the last 50 years.
Just to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else.<p>The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc...<p>In those metrics, steady gains <i>have</i> been made, it's just that the actual component sizes haven't matched up to the gains recently. Instead, new types of technologies like "gate-all-around" have been used to eke out more performance instead of simply shrinking everything proportionally.
Just read this in <i>Chip War</i> (p. 333) by Chris Miller:<p>> Gelsinger has cut a deal with ASML to let Intel acquire the first next-generation EUV machine, which is expected to be ready in 2025. If Intel can learn how to use these new tools before rivals, it could provide a technological edge.<p>Is the book talking about the same tech or different? If the same, does it mean that Intel only gets a year or two of headstart?
Surely ASML would prefer that Samsung and Intel could keep up with TSMC on manufacturing the latest and greatest CPU/GPU/SoCs. So not hard to believe that they'll sell the first next gen machines to Samsung.
A few days ago it was reported that Chine companies started producing 5nm chips (model Kirin 9006C) - many years earlier than US government expected they will be able to do so. With this insane progress I will not wonder if Chinese companies start mass producing 2nm chips earlier than anyone else.
Atomic radius (average distance from the center to the outermost isolated electron) of copper 135pm, silicon 0.11pm.<p>2nm is 7 copper atoms or 9 silicon atoms.
Anyone here who knows what are the benefits of going from, say, 4 or 3nm to 2nm? ASML talks about energy cost per function mostly, but it’s not as clear cut as transitions in the 2000s were if I‘m not mistaken.
How far does a $762 million deal get you? Doesn't seem like such a huge sum for priority access to next gen 2nm machines, but also hard to judge as a layperson...
Samsung still has to solve yield and capacity problems. It wasn't only process node advantage that made customers form lines in front of TSMC shop.
Nigel Tufnel, chief scientist at TSMC, explains the merits of the latest hardware from ASML:<p>"This is a fab, but it's very special because if you can see, the numbers all go down to 2nm. Look, right across the board. 2nm, 2nm, 2nm, 2nm ..."<p>"And most of the fabs go down to 3."<p>"Exactly."<p>"Does that mean it's ... smaller? Is it any smaller?"<p>"Well, it's one smaller, isn't it? It's not 3. You see, most fabs are going to be running at 3. You're on 3 on your fab -- where can you go from there? Where?"<p>"I dunno."<p>"Nowhere, exactly. And what we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?"<p>"Put it down to 2."<p>"2. Exactly. One smaller."