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It's still a little disingenuous because most performance parameters are directly related to transistor lengths, whether finfet or not. There used to be a conce
by kayson 6y ago
It's still a little disingenuous because most performance parameters are directly related to transistor lengths, whether finfet or not. There used to be a concept of "scaling" where you could roughly estimate that going from a 40nm process to a 28nm process, for example, would save you (28/40)^2 percent power. Finfet disrupted that to some extent, but it partly held true as physical lengths actually continued to decrease with node names. By now, though, it is generally understood that state-of-the-art process node numbers doesn't mean much in that regard.
I also just checked a handful of processes I have access to, and at least in these cases, the fin width doesn't scale with the technology name (e.g. 5nm and 7nm has 8nm fin width drawn in layout, and model indicates 27nm "width" per fin). This isn't much of a surprise to me, because foundries are just decreasing the number with newer generations of the tech, even if the lithography (the method by which features are etched into the silicon) hasn't significantly changed. For example, 3 generations of a single process were called 7***, then 5***, then 4***.
- dnautics 6y ago> It's still a little disingenuous because most performance parameters That's your bias. To a process engineer the parameter that matters is what wavelength you are blasting the mask with and what size a feature it can create.
- lumost 6y agoThis is probably similar to the debate between management and engineers at Intel. As an outside observer who has never been near CPU design let alone process engineering - TSMC's nomenclature smacks of moving the goal post to claim a win. Despite the reality that from a process engineering standpoint decoupling the "transistor size" from the production node is an improvement and allowed TSMC to ship a technically superior process.
- Guthur 6y agoAnd also does it actually matter. It ultimately refers to some improved denser semiconductor process which is what the customer is buying. These processes are not exactly standardised either it would be a major undertaking to take an architecture from TSMC 7nm to 5nm let alone moving from TSMC to Samsung, Global Foundaries or if at all possible Intel.