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At the end of March, two semiconductor manufacturing titans climbed another rung on the ladder of Moore's Law.
Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) announced 5nm manufacturing of at-risk-production while Samsung announced its own 5nm manufacturing process was ready for sampling.
TSMC says its 5-nm process offers a 15 percent speed gain or a 30 percent improvement in power efficiency. Samsung is promising a 10 percent performance improvement or a 20 percent efficiency improvement
Also, "both Samsung and TSMC are offering what they're calling a 6-nm process" as a kind of stepping stone for customers with earlier availability (H2 2019) vs 5nm production.
Unfortunately, but perhaps not unexpectedly, the playing field has narrowed significantly with the progression to 5nm foundry production
GlobalFoundries gave up at 14 nm and Intel, which is years late with its rollout of an equivalent to competitors' 7 nm, is thought to be pulling back on its foundry services, according to analysts.
Samsung and TSMC remain because they can afford the investment and expect a reasonable return. Samsung was the largest chipmaker by revenue in 2018, but its foundry business ranks fourth, with TSMC in the lead. TSMC's capital expenditure was $10 billion in 2018. Samsung expects to nearly match that on a per-year basis until 2030.
Can the industry function with only two companies capable of the most advanced manufacturing processes? "It's not a question of can it work?" says [G. Dan Hutcheson, at VLSI Research]. "It has to work."
According to Len Jelinek, a semiconductor-manufacturing analyst at IHS Markit. "As long as we have at least two viable solutions, then the industry will be comfortable"
There may only be two left, but neither company is sitting still:
- Samsung has already announced 3nm fab plans and released design kits.
- TSMC has gained approval for the construction of a 3nm factory next to its 5nm fab.
Previous Coverage
TSMC's "5nm" (CLN5FF) Process On-Track for High-Volume Manufacturing in 2020
TSMC Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony for "5nm" Fab, Production to Begin in 2020
Samsung Plans to Make "5nm" Chips Starting in 2019-2020
TSMC Details Scaling/Performance Gains Expected From "5nm CLN5" Process
TSMC Tapes Out Second-Generation "7nm" Chip Using EUV, Will Begin Risk Production of "5nm" in April
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @06:53AM (1 child)
If we could use physical tri-state logic orderly to represent trits instead of bits, density and precision of computations would be proportionally increased. Unfortunately, a Shannon's curse of binary still haunts us, an apparition of two's complement...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 03 2019, @07:20AM
Unfortunately, a Shannon's curse of binary still haunts us
Shannon used bits as measure of information, not implying that this is what you should use. No, the use of bits is because this allows simpler circuits. A basic NOT gate just needs one transistor. A basic NAND gate needs one transistor per input. I'd suspect that implementing trit gates in hardware is sufficiently complex that it at least negates the savings from needing less of them.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Monday June 03 2019, @06:54AM (10 children)
TSMC's "6nm" is a denser drop-in for the current "7nm". According to them, it will have no performance and power consumption improvements, just a bit of area scaling. It looks like it will be a bit worse than "7nm+" which uses more EUV, but companies that already developed designs for "7nm" can save a few bucks.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14228/tsmc-reveals-6-nm-process-technology-7-nm-with-higher-transistor-density [anandtech.com]
"3nm" should be the point when TSMC and Samsung transition to gate-all-around transistors.
There could be a couple of nodes beyond that before real big changes are needed. Like these [soylentnews.org].
https://semiengineering.com/transistor-options-beyond-3nm/ [semiengineering.com]
https://semiengineering.com/big-trouble-at-3nm/ [semiengineering.com] (article was written before GlobalFoundries chickened out of "7nm")
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday June 03 2019, @07:29AM
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @10:42AM (3 children)
What do you think about apples new $7999.99 wieghtless and completely transparent MacBook?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Monday June 03 2019, @10:59AM (2 children)
It uses a 0nm processor, right?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @12:45PM (1 child)
Yep, 0 nm technology.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 03 2019, @05:36PM
Incidentally, 0nm is also the travel on the keyboard they'll put on it.
"3D haptic feedback", they'll call it. With changeable keyboard shapes.
Yet it will still fail because of microscopic dust, and it will be your fault.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday June 03 2019, @02:51PM (4 children)
Good stuff, thanks. So the question becomes how useful is just area scaling alone to customers that would be designing these parts into their products. Depends of course on the application, and whether you run into thermal or power consumption issues.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 03 2019, @05:43PM (3 children)
Almost all chips can handle having a thermal interface to the copper that's 18% smaller. The problem is usually interfacing the copper to air.
Intel would have to stop using dumb paste, but that's about it.
On the other hand, 18% chip size reduction means significantly higher yields (more dies per wafer if constant impurities).
While the transistors don't change, calling 6 instead 7 is actually a reasonable approach, for once.
On the other hand, having 5nm, 6nm, 7nm, 10nm (even before Intel goes 10nm++UltraTurboAlphaPrime) is going to be confusing for anyone not knee-deep in that industry.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 03 2019, @08:38PM (2 children)
If there aren't any thermal problems, more chiplets could be stuffed onto a board. Epyc uses 8 for 64 cores, rumor has it that it could be increased to 10+.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday June 03 2019, @08:51PM (1 child)
You can keep adding chiplets as long as you find a way to bring more Amps in, and take more Watts out, of the socket.
The chiplet size is not the most important factor. Cu is a great conductor, and solder is pretty good. Intel caused trouble with their shitty solder paste, making big die sizes actually better, but using proper methods, the conductivity is so much better that die size is nowhere near the system's limiting factor.
You also need to make sure you don't put too many chiplets on the shared resources, or have more shared resources to avoid starvation. Each chiplet requires a good deal of connectivity, so you end up needing two separate IO chips, a small one for the cheap stuff, and a bit one to enable the extra connections. That's got a non-trivial cost.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 03 2019, @11:24PM
I allude to these rumors:
AMD Milan Rumor: ~80 Cores, Combined With GPUs + HBM [soylentnews.org]
If AMD chooses not to use the "6nm" node and uses "7nm+" instead, they could take advantage of power efficiency improvements.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 03 2019, @12:01PM
The respected old brand name Bosch (Intel) quotes a conservative 3.6V per 18650 LiIon cell in their power pack, marketing an 18V (5 cell) product. Meanwhile, the less conservative upstart Kobalt (TSMC/Samsung) brazenly rates their same 18650 cells at 4.0V a piece, marketing a 24V (6 cell) product.
The Kobalt product does have superior base physics behind its performance, just not quite the margin that's claimed on the packaging. Then we can talk about the quality of the tools that these power cells drive...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 03 2019, @07:14PM (1 child)
Moore's Law: Every 18 months, the speed of hardware doubles.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Monday June 03 2019, @11:25PM
Turn off automatic updates.
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