4 ms·
Hey, its my first comment on Hacker News. This won't help in terms of clarity of how good the transistor is. As others mentioned, there are different kinds of
by mattaldisi 4y ago
Hey, its my first comment on Hacker News.
This won't help in terms of clarity of how good the transistor is. As others mentioned, there are different kinds of transistors and different manufactures would still use their smallest (read not necessarily the fastest/strongest/mostly used) to market their process.
A major reason I think this won't work is that transistor size no-longer limits the density of the chip. Nodes below 20nm have transistor contacts (what connects the silicon to metal), and metal tracks that are much larger than the transistor. The contacts typically limit the pitch between transistors and hence the density. A lot of innovation is now done to shrink those elements rather than work on the transistor physics/materials/size directly.
- croon 4y ago> A major reason I think this won't work is that transistor size no-longer limits the density of the chip. Nodes below 20nm have transistor contacts (what connects the silicon to metal), and metal tracks that are much larger than the transistor. The contacts typically limit the pitch between transistors and hence the density. A lot of innovation is now done to shrink those elements rather than work on the transistor physics/materials/size directly. Layman question from not GP, but wouldn't reducing the "overhead" around transistors increase the transistors-per-area metric and thus be at least somewhat useful?
- mattaldisi 4y agoHey, you are right. I thought about that right after I posted my comment but the devil is in the details. As you shrink the contacts and the metals their resistance and capacitance exponentially increase. This means that both your power will go up and your speeds will go down. Also the process becomes more prone to manufacturing errors. So shrinking those elements blindly without innovation just to increase the density numbers is not really a good metric of the quality of the process.
- manholio 4y agoHow about: transistor switches /( s * mm * Joule) ? Koomey's law seems to hold strong.
- mattaldisi 4y agoI did not know about it, thanks! It looks like it is holding well. I work in Analog so I'd like a more analog based definition (which also works for digital tbh) based on size or density, trans-conductance(gm), output resistance (ro), and Unity frequency (fT) but that's never going to happen :<