We really lack a better name here than packaging. When it was packaging substrate, wire-bonds, chip, pins, and heat spreader, yeah, ok. But now the substrate i

We really lack a better name here than packaging. When it was packaging substrate, wire-bonds, chip, pins, and heat spreader, yeah, ok. But now the substrate is probably it's own interposer, perhaps with more interposers in it, the chip is probably at least two chips, when more and more is stacked together & intricately interconnected: the word packaging feels super super insufficient. Massive shout out to "The Rising Tide of Semi-conductor Costs"[1] for talking to a bunch of related concerns. It didn't go nearly deep enough into this point, and this article does a little more, but it found the choice quote, and it's implicitly about "all this": > ASML, in its investor day, made a bold statement that Moore’s Law will continue with system-level scaling. Which seems exactly so. Via "advanced packaging". Via stacking more chips up. Via better interposers & EIMB to string together more chips more closely. We're on the cusp of advanced chips becoming many chips. For places like flash memory, this has been the way already for a while, but we're stacking cache and main memory and real compute atop each other, connecting them side ways-- what was "the chip" is being reborn, is now a system of chips. However the Rising Tide article's core point is much more complex, about costs & complexity. It could well be blistering correct that this reformulation, that this advanced packaging, while allowing much more advanced scaling, wont aid the same Moore's Law we have come to enjoy: > I want to focus not just on the technological headwinds, but the cost headwinds. One of the major historical assumptions of Moore’s Law is that not only would your transistors double every two years, but the cost of the transistors would decline. No longer. [1] https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-semiconductor https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-sem... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29316389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29316389 (6 days ago, 4 comments)