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TSMC approaching 1 nm with 2D materials breakthrough
- arriu 4y ago> Using non-silicon materials facilitates very tiny transistors—as small as 1 nm. However, as TSMC researchers acknowledge, the 1-nm process node is not likely to be used for years to come. Is anyone else using non-silicon materials yet?
- ksec 4y ago>Is anyone else using non-silicon materials yet? Gallium
- Maursault 4y agoGallium could only produce microchips larger than silicon. What we need are diamond microchips which should outperform silicon chips by a factor of 23K and be a third smaller.
- hinkley 4y agoGermanium is bigger, right? It’s used in DSP chips and now in power transformers. The fact that it’s used for high frequency circuitry has always made me wonder why we don’t do large scale chips in it. Surely cheaper than the acrobatics we are doing for <5nm, no? It’s used in current-dense applications and leakage current is out boogeyman with silicon.
- twosdai 4y agoI have some background in this space in undergrad. Non Si materials are used in industry, germanium is used in some special applications and i believe its the #2 semiconducting material, however it is harder to use than Si because it's very difficult to keep it clean of impurities. Not the doping kind. Source: I helped with a research project using Ge. Here's the paper if anyone is curious https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8653561 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8653561
- kken 4y agoSiGe is used since the 90nm node as source/Drain material.
- e2e8 4y agoSeveral kinds of semiconductor materials are used for high power or high frequency applications but only at much larger process nodes. For example Gallium Nitride, InP, SiGe.
- kragen 4y agoThe first transistors were made of germanium, and before germanium diodes were made from selenium and from an oxide of copper. Crystal radios commonly used Schottky diodes made of galena. Gallium arsenide is big business.
- imiric 4y agoA related question: is photonics on the radar yet as a possible next breakthrough, or is it still in research and experimental phases?
- superkuh 4y agoRiiiight. 1 nm naming and ~15-20 nm pitch? Like the current 5nm stuff with a ~20-30 nm pitch and element size. ref: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process
- WithinReason 4y agoThis comment is there under every article that has nm in it. For the millionth time, 1 nm should be read as "1 nm equivalent". The purpose of the naming is to continue to scale with density.
- audunw 4y agoGetting so tired of this knee jerk complaint. Do you design standard cell libraries or analog ASIC IPs? If not, why would you care that "1nm" doesn't correspond to an actual dimension in the process? I work with ASIC design in a node where the name still matches the minimum gate length, and the number of times this has actual mattered to me is exactly zero. What does matter to most people is transistor density and other performance metrics that actually have an impact on the product. The "Xnm" has always given a rough indication of the improvements in transistor density, and all the foundries has done is continue to name the nodes as if that's what matters... which is indeed the case. TSMC does sometimes call the nodes eg "N7" now. But nobody that matter cares because everyone understands that "7nm" is a marketing term.
- orangepurple 4y agoIt's a deception. So many people believe that it is the actual gate size, even educated folk not directly involved in semiconductor manufacturing.
- spamizbad 4y agoWho is it deceiving? It sounds like the only people who get “tricked” are laypersons; professionals do not.
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- kken 4y agoso this is again one of these "material x was slightly better in a lab experiment" -> "we conclude that it certainly can be used as part of a complex technology" press releases. I am not too fond of this, but obviously thats the easiest way to explain the significance of research results. Getting a new material into a semiconductor manufacturing process takes years or even decades. Whatever material will be in TSMCs "1nm" process, it is already known.
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- sillysaurusx 4y ago(RIP memristors. Those have similarly been on the cusp of revolutionizing everything for … I think over a decade now?)
- ewams 4y agoYup, I wrote about them from an HP conference in 2010 and remember being told about them for a roadmap item well before that: http://ewams.net/?date=2010/09/05&view=hptechforum2010 http://ewams.net/?date=2010/09/05&view=hptechforum2010 Another one of those "right around the corner" things that is always coming soon.
- hinkley 4y agoWorld is full of technologies that would be cool if you also had a Time Machine. But other tech outpaces is so if it is born behind it never takes off. Some of it is pretty fun for playing what if with (enforced) pastoralism. Using primitive materials with a modern understanding of them, instead of limiting yourself to historically accurate processes.
- agumonkey 4y agoI take the slightly more patient approach with this. LCD used very old discoveries, something need to mature through a few industrial cycles before it gets discarded I guess.
- transfire 4y agoThis is great and all, but in the end it just buys us a few more years. Something more radical has to come along eventually if we want to continue a Moore-esque pattern. I wonder what happened to plans for optical interconnects?
- lwneal 4y agoAt this rate they'll be manufacturing 0nm chips soon, and in a decade they'll be on -1nm. But despite the weird naming scheme, it's clear from transistor density [1] and GPU prices [2] that foundries are still making progress in transistors per dollar. That progress is just barely beginning to make large neural networks (Stable Diffusion, vision and speech systems, language model AIs) deployable in consumer applications. It might not matter whether your cell phone renders this page in 1ms or 10ms, but the difference between talking to a 20B parameter language model and a 200B net is night and day [3]. If TSMC/Samsung/Intel can squeeze out just one or two more nodes, then by the middle of the century we might have limited general-purpose AI in every home and office. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#GPUs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#GPUs [2] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/ https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/video-card/ [3] https://textsynth.com/playground.html https://textsynth.com/playground.html
- Ptchd 4y agoThey aren't even really 1nm.... but either way, they could switch to pico-meter.....
- simpsond 4y agoIntel chose Angstroms for their roadmap nodes: 20A = 2nm.
- algo_trader 4y ago> clear from .. that foundries are still making progress in transistors per dollar. Are they? Home GPU price have been elevated due to crypto. Latest node CPUs are mostly opaque long-term contracts. The xxBN transistors chips are priced at $xx,000. If you have a (better) reference I would love to see it.
- oezi 4y agoJust look at the latest Apple silicon. Transistor per dollar and TDP is showing great strides. Intel and Nvidia just got too lazy or fumbled their node progress.
- kjkjadksj 4y agoI’m going to love seeing all these gains eaten alive by adware and js and general modern software bloat, while the common user does the same functions on the computer they've been doing since the 1990s (email/web browsing/document writing).
- onsoup 4y agoOh well time to buy apple stock
- sylware 4y agoCould we finally, get a diagram, you know a 100dpi PNG, with a 3D representation of the most constraint logic transistor at 3/2/1nm with all the metric quotes?