4 ms·
On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a less than a decade, there's a huge gap there
by eloff 6y ago
On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a less than a decade, there's a huge gap there and the old process isn't worth much. If you go from 14nm to 2nm, you can still use 14nm for a lot of price sensitive customers.
- oivey 6y agoThe density increase is similar between those two jumps, isn’t it? Density significantly drives the price of chips since you can use it to create more chips per wafer. Maybe developing chips at 2 nm will be much more difficult due to quantum effects?
- packetlost 6y agoBefore you start reaching quantum effects, you'll run into crosstalk problems where electrons on 1 circuit path can jump through the silicon substrate to other paths, effectively causing a short. There is a limit to how much you can do with silicon as your substrate simply because of the size of the atoms.
- oivey 6y agoThat’s quantum tunneling, right? That’s one of the quantum effects I was referencing.
- fomine3 6y agox nm is now tend to be a marketing number, so not so much compared to old number.
- buran77 6y agoThe law of diminishing returns. Shrinking brings lower and lower benefits because the jumps may be hefty in relative values (10% smaller) but in absolute values (nm) they don't bring the same benefit as they did 15-20 years ago. On the other hand, even in practical terms the older nodes are more than adequate for most customers these days simply because they are far closer to a modern node than the equivalent would have been 20 years ago (for the reason stated above).