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TSMC and OIP Deliver Industry’s First Complete Design Infrastructure 5nm Process
- wmf 8y agoI guess the Apple A14 and maybe AMD Zen 4 will use this process.
- olliej 8y agoCan anyone with more understanding of these things given a run down on how this 5nm compares to 5/7/10nm from other companies?
- mappu 8y agoLayman 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.
- chx 8y ago> Intel will have a 10nm later this year Intel hopes to have a 10nm later this year
- zaarn 8y agoAt current progress, Intel will have a 10nm ready for a Q4 2022 release, excluding processors that would rather melt through the mainboard than run demanding tasks (or doubling as space heater).
- chx 8y agoThe thing is, by 2022 they will likely have 7nm which is a totally separate team and effort and it's much more likely to succeed thanks to EUV. I have even seen late 2021 estimates for that and it's not entirely impossible they can crunch off a few months off arriving to a point where 10nm will have 2020 for it and that's it. An effort that took more than seven years and it's all going to waste.
- benj111 8y agoYou could still cast doubt on that, even if it were a completely separate team though. Without knowing the causes for why Intel are failing to deliver 10nm we can't say if it's an Intel problem, or a 10nm team problem. And even then, would they not be building on the 10nm process to develop the 7nm process to some extent? Otherwise you're reinventing the wheel twice, and may as well jump straight to 5/3/2nm processes.
- Symmetry 8y agoThere have been a bunch of rumors leaking out of Intel on the reasons. The biggest one was apparently that the Contact Over Active Gate just didn't work. That was used extensively in the GPU section of the die but not the CPU part which is why the 10nm chips released had working CPUs but no graphics. They've cut that feature from the process for the new version of 10nm which should help. The other big rumored problem they were having was with cobalt interconnects and I have no idea if they've made it work or abandoned it or what.
- chx 8y agoThere's clearly more to it because it was only the GPU part that didn't work they would've (gladly!) released the server parts.
- kijin 8y agoOf course we don't know for sure, but there's a little precedent. While the Pentium 4 team was churning out ever more power-hungry space heaters, a separate team came up with Pentium M. It became the basis for the Core architecture that gave Intel a 10-year monopoly. If anyone knows that having separate teams reinvent their own wheels can have a massive payoff, it's Intel.
- ksec 8y ago>- 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.
- baybal2 8y agoEquipment 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.
- ksec 8y ago>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.
- 0815test 8y ago> Global Foundries have stopped further investment beyond 14nm. That's an interesting approach since they'll be able to refine the 14nm step itself much like Intel has been doing for some time. That leaves them in a pretty good position as the finer nodes (10nm, 7nm etc.) will be inherently limited for a long time due to their unfavorable NRE costs, use will be possible only for the highest-profile stuff with the broadest feasible market.
- azinman2 8y agoSo it seems Intel has fully last it’s manufacturing lead now?
- nardi 8y agoIntel lost its lead a long time ago. Now they are falling further behind.
- mjevans 8y agoWow, 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
- thechao 8y agoDon’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 alot of room down there, below the extended Moore’s law, just not always so CMOS-ey.
- FakeComments 8y agoSo does “effective feature size” mean anything? Besides that 5 < 7.
- Symmetry 8y agoMy understanding is that in the old days of planar transistors it had a clear meaning but with modern designs not so much.
- bogomipz 8y agoCould you elaborate, what does “effective feature size” mean in the context of process technology?
- thechao 8y agoIt'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.
- ww520 8y agoCooler Nvdia chips? More pixels cranked through the video cards? 8K or 16K videos coming?
- philjohn 8y agoNV are still on 12nm with Turing.
- CoolGuySteve 8y agoUnless 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.
- doe88 8y agoAs 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?
- ksec 8y agoA 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.
- whazor 8y agoTSMC manufacture circuits based on customer design, this could be CPU, 5G modems, SoC, GPU etcetera. TSMC is like circuits printing company. Therefore it is more difficult to compare progress of TSMC versus Intel. But also, because they print so much (and so diverse) nowadays, they get priority at all the semiconductor machine companies.
- SlipperySlope 8y agoTrump should declare a US national security tariff on Asian semiconductors of say 50%^ to get the fabs built in the USA. Apply the tariffs to semis whether contained in something else or as parts.
- phkahler 8y ago>> 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.
- mensetmanusman 8y agoInteresting that the CEO of Intel saying ‘no’ to Steve Jobs results in this happening 15 years later.
- no1youknowz 8y agoWhat 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.
- thesz 8y ago5nm is 150 atoms wide. "Several tens of atoms" is a definition of nanoscale, from what I remember.