
TSMC Talks 7nm, 5nm, Yield, and Next-Gen 5G and HPC Packaging - rbanffy
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2567/tsmc-talks-7nm-5nm-yield-and-next-gen-5g-and-hpc-packaging/
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sanxiyn
> by our estimate TSMC will be a "full node" ahead of both Intel and Samsung

How times have changed! I still vividly remember Intel being a full node ahead
of everyone else with their release of 22nm node. For example, see this
article from 2012: [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/127987-deliberate-
exce...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/127987-deliberate-excellence-
why-intel-leads-the-world-in-semiconductor-manufacturing)

This too shall pass.

~~~
ww520
I don't know whether the Intel foundry accepts outside customers and to what
extent the outside customers have influence on Intel, but TSMC benefits from
being single mindedly focused on chip fabrication and has the support of a
wide array of customers, financially and technically. Apple, Nvida, AMD,
Qualcom, Micron, most of the phone manufacturers, and any other chip consumers
all give orders to TSMC. All these pour money, design and production
requirement into TSMC. TSMC simply is more focused with the resource they
have, while Intel is being distracted with other things.

~~~
opencl
Sure TSMC is more focused but Intel has dramatically greater resources. Their
R&D budget is ~5x TSMC's and ~10x AMD's. You have to be pretty badly
distracted to fail to produce superior products with such an enormous budget
advantage.

Intel technically accepts outside fab contracts but they haven't had any
customers since they bought out Altera, their previous only customer.

[1]
[https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense](https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense)

[https://ycharts.com/companies/TSM/r_and_d_expense](https://ycharts.com/companies/TSM/r_and_d_expense)

[https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense](https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/r_and_d_expense)

~~~
ww520
Intel's budget is not just for chip fabrication, they have a very wide array
of product areas. Chip foundry is very cost intensive, in the range of 10's
billions. I'm not surprised TSMC spends way more on fabrication than Intel
does.

~~~
rbanffy
According to the numbers of the post above, if they allocate more than 20% of
their R&D budget to process improvements and more than 10% to their
architecture improvements, they match or exceed their two rivals, leaving 70%
to be allocated to other tracks, which I find rather excessive all things
considered.

I remember a comment I made a long time ago, in the beginning of the Browser
Wars: Microsoft had more people assigned to design their icons than NetScape
had employees. NetScape's fate was sealed from the get go and their resilience
was commendable.

And yet, in the end, Microsoft still lost that war.

------
jsf01
This has me really excited for the future. One question I have now is how this
compares to Intel’s roadmap. I’ve read comparisons like “TSMC 7nm is
equivalent to Intel 10nm” but never seen any further discussion that goes
deeper into how that’s true.

~~~
wmf
From the same site: [https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-and-hp-
cells...](https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/2408/tsmc-7nm-hd-and-hp-cells-2nd-
gen-7nm-and-the-snapdragon-855-dtco/) Scroll down near the bottom.

~~~
dumbfoundded
To summarize the article: the density at which Intel can pack the transistors
on a chip is high enough even with a larger transistor size, still means Intel
has more transistors in the same chip size. The advantage of the 7nm TSMC
transistor is that they are faster and more power-efficient.

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varshithr
AMD struck gold with TSMC right?

~~~
wmf
Yes, although there was an element of luck that Intel 10 nm failed at the same
time that TSMC 7 nm came out smoothly. The opposite situation happened back at
32 nm and could happen again.

~~~
geogra4
yeah but how many nm are left? There's a phsyical limit to transistor size!

~~~
ivalm
There is a lot of density that can be increased. The node size doesn't
represent transistor size, not even the gate size.

~~~
vasili111
What is the theoretical limit? I mean there should be end.

~~~
ivalm
Current density is ~100M (1E8) transistors/mm^2, Assuming transistors with a
side of ~10 atoms (and bond length 0.5nm) that means we could get ~4E12
transistors/mm^2. This is almost certainly over optimistic but still it shows
that we are orders of magnitude away from limits due to "atomic nature" of
matter.

~~~
ComputerGuru
I think you first need to switch to transistors/nm^3 rather than thinking only
in 2d.

~~~
ivalm
Right now these are planar devices. If you stack you can get orders of
magnitude more. That's why you can get absurd memory capacities in things like
nitrogen defect diamonds [0].

[0]
[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600911.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600911.full)

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londons_explore
In today's world of geopolitics, restricting access to decent silicon
processes can have a massive knock on on other industries.

If Taiwan/China have better silicon manufacturing capabilities now, they can
restrict export of those chips, to effectively capture the phone/server
markets too...

Could be a big part in the nail in the coffin for USA tech dominance.

~~~
sct202
Uh, why are you lumping Taiwan in with China? They're 2 separate governing
entities that aren't particularly friendly, and have missiles pointed at each
other.

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pippy
N7+ in early 2020 and 5nm by end of 2020 is pretty impressive. Intel should be
worried.

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unixhero
Wow what a treasure trove that website is.

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IanCal
Absolutely astounding numbers in there as someone who doesn't know the
details. N5 at _a hundred and seventy million transistors per square
millimeter_. That's mindblowing.

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simonebrunozzi
I hate when acronyms prevent people from understanding important parts of an
article. Here you go.

TSMC = "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Limited, also known as
Taiwan Semiconductor, is the world's largest dedicated independent
semiconductor foundry" (from Wikipedia).

~~~
sanxiyn
You are expected to know what TSMC is if you are reading this... People
wouldn't expand AMD to Advanced Micro Devices and then explain it develops CPU
(Central Processing Unit, in case you didn't know!), would they?

~~~
Dylan16807
You're expected to know what they are, but I couldn't have given you the full
version of either. It's pretty irrelevant to the conversation, more trivia
than anything.

