
TSMC: 3nm EUV Development Progress Going Well - hourislate
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14666/tsmc-3nm-euv-development-progress-going-well-early-customers-engaged
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ttul
EUV is definitely solidly in the realm of magic for me. A spray of tin blasted
with 2MW of lasers into a plasma to generate the “light” which is then bounced
off of mirrors which barely qualify as mirrors to produce a focused beam to
burn in features only a handful of atoms wide... 100,000kg of equipment. $100M
per unit.

It’s mind boggling.

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buu700
This is the first I've heard of EUV, so I don't have an informed opinion of it
at all, but some quick googling shows that Intel will be using it for their
7nm process.

Does this mean that Intel's "7nm" should be considered roughly equivalent with
TSMC's "3nm"? And who's typically considered to have the lead on fab tech
nowadays?

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lawrenceyan
I would rank it probably as: 1) TSMC 2) Samsung 3) Intel

AMD now divested into Global Foundries used to be on there as well, but
they're pretty much dead in the water at this point. Both AMD and Nvidia use
TSMC now actually. It's kind of funny that Intel is the only remaining foundry
within the United States at this point except for maybe Texas Instruments,
which lets be honest, doesn't really count.

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throwaway2048
Global foundries still does plenty of production, most chip production doesn't
occur at cutting edge nodes.

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stjohnswarts
You're exactly right. There's a lot of money to be made outside of 3/7/10nm.
I'm not sure why geeks get hooked on having the smallest/biggest or nothing
and assuming anything else is failure

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rowanG077
It's because it's immensely cool what humanity can continue to achieve.

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new299
I guess 3nm is just marketing, but I’d be interested in better understanding
the feature sizes here and in current processes.

From what I can tell, in their current 5nm process the smallest features are
on the order of 30nm? Is that correct? [1] I guess what I’d really like to see
is some structures and annotation showing feature sizes. These rarely seem to
be shown.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer)

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fspeech
Transistor (FINFET) width should be around 7nm for the 7nm process
([https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/7_nm_lithography_process))
but you are right that transistor pitch isn't scaling nearly as fast so
transistor density is not going up as fast. Cost per transistor was actually
flat (maybe even going up) at the 7nm node.

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atq2119
What's perhaps even worse is that _metal pitch_ doesn't scale as fast. As a
consequence, the ratio of wiring space per transistor has been decreasing for
a couple of nodes now, which makes wiring much more difficult and makes it
more difficult to use all the transistor area effectively. Basically, designs
more frequently have to reduce their density of useful transistors in order to
be able to lay down the wiring connections.

The number of metal layers can be increased to fight back against this effect
somewhat, but you still need space for vias to go through the lowest metal
layers, and with design rules getting more complex placing those vias is
itself getting tougher (though obviously EUV for metal layers helps there
because it allows the design rules to become a bit more relaxed).

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ksec
So it turns out there aren't any 7nm EUV in high volume ( comparatively
speaking ) shipment from TSMC as originally expected. While this isn't
confirmed, I would assume Apple to have make a bigger announcement in Keynote
if they were using 7nm EUV, since they only mentioned 2nd-Generation 7nm, this
is likely an improved version of 7nm DUV, aka N7P ( 2nd Generation 7nm is also
an Semi Official Term TSMC uses to describe N7P, while specially mentioning
EUV when it is involved ).

The question we have now, would Apple A14 be 7nm EUV, or would it be 5nm? If
it is 5nm as the original cadence suggest, then we could expect 3nm EUV A16 in
2022.

And Intel doesn't plan to ship their 7nm EUV till late 2021, in a volume
likely much smaller than anything currently Apple ships.

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JohnJamesRambo
What will we do below 3 nm?

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Mathnerd314
Carbon nanotubes, graphene, photonic chips, more involved silicon designs.

There's no shortage of ideas, just uncertain ROIs.

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agumonkey
The 7-5nm was said to be so much a barrier before. I'm sure this will unleash
a ton of capital and brains to keep digging.

ps: I heard spintronics and neutronics caught some wind on paper

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TomMarius
There is a new exciting paper about DNA computers as well.

[https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/leap-forward-for-
molecul...](https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/leap-forward-for-molecular-
computing-as-dna-executes-six-bit-algorithms/3010270.article)

~~~
agumonkey
Hah, Woods of course. Two years ago a previous colleague of him hosted a talk
in Paris. I got a peek of the work it was truly staggering. But the guy told
me they were too instable at scale so far. Sounds like a solid hint at the
future though.

ps: do you work in this field ?

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TomMarius
Not at all, just an interested layperson (I'm in 'normal' IT). My partner
studies evolutionary genetics (or something like that), so we talk frequently
about biology. There is another DNA computing paper that was very interesting
published earlier this year by another group, but I can't find it now. I think
it was in Nature.

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agumonkey
Not a good week for intel

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amos19870630
One day, maybe, but not soon.

It's great that we can have dream machines at ridiculously low prices, but
these machines are valuable enough that we'd buy them at 2x or 3x the price,
easily. There'll be a whole lot of grumbling and complaining, as always. But
people have grumbled and complain since the iPhone 1 and every year there
after --- and they've been MASSIVELY wrong about the value of these devices
compared to their costs, and so, just how desirable they are.

At the end of the day, are you not willing to pay $5K extra from a car that's
REALLY self-driving and ultra-safe? Would you not pay $3K for something like
your phone, only with enough performance to translate any text or words you
hear, and to behave as intelligently as a human secretary?

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xwolfi
Think of the billions in electricity saved each new size reduction, for data
centers and even the general pop doing the same thing as ever with less
current, or more for the same cost.

I watch 4k videos a lot, imagine the cost of rendering that 20 years ago.

