
TSMC and OIP Deliver Industry’s First Complete Design Infrastructure 5nm Process - ytch
https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&newsid=THPGWQTHTH&language=E
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doe88
As an outsider I would never had anticipated Intel being leapfroged like that
in such a short window of time. As side effect it probably largely contributed
to the resurrection of AMD (coupled with the fact they probably produced with
Ryzen a good design at the right time). I would like to know if Intel just
fumbled or if TSMC stepped-up their game, or more likely a little bit of both?

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ksec
A little bit of both. Intel's 10nm is now officially 2 years late. If they had
7nm now they would still be in the lead given its ( original ) 7nm plan were
roughly equivalent to TSMC 5nm.

TSMC also gained lots of momentum from the Smartphone Revolution. All of a
sudden you have a 1.3B Smartphone Market, from SoC, Wireless BaseBand, and all
sort of other component Fabbed with TSMC, compared to Intel's 250M PC Market.
Now of course Intel make many times higher margin, but considered TSMC has a
diverse group of clients utilising its current and old Fab compared to Intel
doing it all by themselves, TSMC now has similar resources to Intel and
innovate.

And compared to Intel which has big leaps across generation, TSMC's approach
were to iterate, so you get 16nm, 16mn+, 10nm, 7nm, 7nm EUV, 5nm EUV, all of
them were iteration of previous generation.

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phkahler
>> Compared with TSMC’s 7nm process, its innovative scaling features deliver
1.8X logic density and 15% speed gain on an ARM® Cortex®-A72 core, along with
superior SRAM and analog area reduction enabled by the process architecture.

Since process names have largely lost any meaning I just wanted to see if they
compared density to their own previous node. I was not disappointed, though
they don't mention the actual SRAM density change.

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mjevans
Wow, that's really small, and also really close to the theoretical limits (I
recalled and thus looked for confirmation of that memory).

It seems like moving past 5nm is going to be... a lot differnet.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire)

(edit to add) Nanowire is mentioned as the next likely node after 5nm on that
article, but it doesn't link back:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer)

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thechao
Don’t conflate “effective feature size” (the 5nm used in this article) with
“real” feature size (or, more importantly, pitch), with transistor size.
Transistors are still _huge_ compared to atoms—think hundreds of thousands, or
millions. The issues at this scale are all electrical. (Bullshit terms like
“quantum tunneling” are bandied about; the scientific use isn’t wrong, but any
journalist using the term probably is.)

There’s a _lot_ of room down there, below the extended Moore’s law, just not
always so CMOS-ey.

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bogomipz
Could you elaborate, what does “effective feature size” mean in the context of
process technology?

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thechao
It's my personal way of politely saying "marketing bullshit". The real
importance of 5nm vs. 7nm is the density of the transistors. A large portion
of the recent gains in transistor density have been from reducing the pitch
(the space between) transistors, rather than shrinking the size of the
transistor.

~~~
bogomipz
Ah ok, that's quite funny. Does pitch reduction result in performance gains
indirectly though - more transistors per chip?

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thechao
That's an ultra-qualified "yes". Hardware isn't magic. Once you've got a
Turing-complete device, software can cover the rest. However, HW
implementations of functionality are 'better' than software in the sense of
being _either_ faster _or_ more power-efficient. (Or some trade-off.) Our
chips are _better_ because we can throw more customized hardware to side-step
(slow; power-hungry) software implementations. We have access to more
customized HW because we have more transistors.

If you're asking long-run questions in terms of HW/SW stack performance, I
strongly suspect we've got another 3-10 doublings with "just more HW". If any
of the post-patterning mechanisms pan out we could, theoretically, get another
15-20 doublings by going all the way down to atoms. After that ... I dunno;
sort of the realm of scifi at that point.

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bogomipz
Thanks that all makes good sense. I was curious about "post-pattering
mechanisms"? Is this a new area in fab process technology? Might you have some
links? Another 15-20 doublings from where we are today is pretty awesome.

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dfrage
Patterning is the use of multiple masks to get fine features smaller than the
wavelength of light you're using where in previous larger feature nodes one
mask sufficed:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning)

It's very expensive in terms of tooling, since you need a lot more more masks,
and production time spend in lithography steps. See this comment in this
discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19570724)
for a bit more.

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wmf
I guess the Apple A14 and maybe AMD Zen 4 will use this process.

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olliej
Can anyone with more understanding of these things given a run down on how
this 5nm compares to 5/7/10nm from other companies?

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mappu
Layman POV:

\- TSMC are the only company currently shipping real products at 7nm, and 5nm
is a full generation ahead beyond that - nobody else is anywhere close to 5nm.

\- Samsung will have a 7nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to
TSMC's current 7nm (data point: the Galaxy S10 ships with either the Exynos
9820 on Samsung's "8nm" (enhanced/rebranded 10nm) process, or the broadly-
similar-performance-with-better-power-efficiency Snapdragon 855 on TSMC 7nm)

\- Intel will have a 10nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to TSMC's
current 7nm. They are still shipping 14nm as their leading node.

\- Global Foundries have stopped further investment beyond 14nm.

~~~
ksec
>\- Intel will have a 10nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to
TSMC's _current_ 7nm. They are still shipping 14nm as their leading node.

Just to add, by that time TSMC will have an improved 7nm based on EUV.

I wonder what happens after TSMC 3nm, that is roughly 2022 / 2023\. I am
pretty sure we can do 2nm, but without another market expansion to further
spread the cost of unit, I wonder who will be able to afford these leading
nodes. With every generation being much more expensive than previous gen.
Smartphone unit shipment are not growing, in fact leading node Mobile SoC are
likely shrinking on a YoY basis due to slower replacement cycle.

We surely haven't reach the technical limit of SemiConductors, but it looks to
me we reach the Market / Economical Limit.

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baybal2
Equipment sales were actually going down for close to 3 years now. We are up
for long winter in the industry.

7nm is here to stay. 5nm is possible it is just an optimisation of 7nm SAQP
and can be done without radical increase of maskset costs.

After that, we are going down the rabbit hole of EUV litho.

A poorly held secret in the industry is that fabs want to use EUV to not to
make <7nm, but to make economical <40nm litho with single exposure.

The biggest increase in cost after 40nm were due to increased numbers of
exposures and more non-device and metal layers.

Cheap 20nm, single exposure planar litho will be a very commercially
attractive process for a lot of things.

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ksec
>Equipment sales were actually going down for close to 3 years now. We are up
for long winter in the industry.

I heard some say this, Would it really be "Winter" though? I guess from
equipment manufacture perspective that is yes. From the industry as whole I
guess it is just longer cycle, more cost reduction from technology stand
points.

>A poorly held secret in the industry is that fabs want to use EUV to not to
make <7nm, but to make economical <40nm litho with single exposure.

I guess that is still many years out? Considering all the ASML EUV unit are
fully booked till 2021, and with increasing use of EUV from Intel I guess that
is likely to continue till 2023 / 2024.

It would be quite some time before we can make super cheap 20nm components.

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baybal2
> I heard some say this, Would it really be "Winter" though?

Yes, serious economists hired by fab companies almost all think so. See, fab
ecosystem can't create demand by itself, it relies on clients selling new
fancy things, and there are no new fancy things on the horizon, and even
"megaclients" are scaling down new orders.

The one overt ways fabs can stimulate consumption is by inventing ground
breaking new concepts, and then giving them away... As was with chip cameras
(smartphones, optical mouses) RF integration (think of every SoC with wireless
today,) MEMS, power on silicon...

Even on that from, there is little new things coming.

> I guess that is still many years out? Considering all the ASML EUV unit are
> fully booked till 2021, and with increasing use of EUV from Intel I guess
> that is likely to continue till 2023 / 2024.

1 single exposure on planar EUV process can replace 10+ multiple patterning
exposures. So, even with a dramatically lower throughput, it can slash process
times, and shoot up yields.

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mensetmanusman
Interesting that the CEO of Intel saying ‘no’ to Steve Jobs results in this
happening 15 years later.

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no1youknowz
What does this mean for Apple? Could we see a 5nm Arm MBPr from them in 2021?

I would really love to see this and a macbook which finally does not throttle
under load and is really quiet.

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thesz
5nm is 150 atoms wide. "Several tens of atoms" is a definition of nanoscale,
from what I remember.

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ww520
Cooler Nvdia chips? More pixels cranked through the video cards? 8K or 16K
videos coming?

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CoolGuySteve
Unless NVidia skips 7nm altogether, AMD is more likely to take advantage since
AMD is already releasing Navi on 7nm later this year.

It also remains to be seen what the yields are for 5nm. It might be the case
that only small area chips like cell phone SoCs and laptop CPUs can be
manufactured for a long time, as was the case with 12nm and 7nm. GPUs
typically need as much area as they can get to fit more compute cores.

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azinman2
So it seems Intel has fully last it’s manufacturing lead now?

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nardi
Intel lost its lead a long time ago. Now they are falling further behind.

