3 ms·

I think an important difference is that EUV exists now.

• garmaine 7y ago
  That’s how you make the chip. I’m not doubting that you can get manufacturing smaller, for a while[0]. But will it still work? You’re getting into the domain where electrons start tunneling across transistors and such. There is a wall that we will hit where lithography can take us no further—we’ll need atomic precision to break through that wall. It’s just a question of where that wall is... [0]: Higher frequency UV light is more tightly focused, but also imparts more energy. At some point the blasting power of a single photon does damage on a scale larger than the wavelengths involved, at which point EUV will take you no further.
  • baybal2 7y ago
    > There is a wall that we will hit where lithography can take us no further This is something being said every few years. There were times when people were telling of 1 micron being "the wall."
  • thechao 7y ago
    Transistors at 7 & 5 are nowhere close to having serious “quantum” issues—that regime is thousands of times smaller than current gate design. Remember that the “size” is a marketing term that really relates most closely to “effective” wire pitch & gate density with respect to processes in the hundreds-of-nanometer scale. The absolute smallest functioning design I’ve read about is IBM’s 7-atom gate. That gate is something like 100thousand times smaller (volumetrically) than current production. Also, current HW design is really inefficient. Think about all the crud between some front-end developer and the server powering the webpage on the backend, vs a ‘native’ app. That’s a good analogy to current HW design and real total-badass low level HW design.