6 ms·

This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year old tech has only dropped a

This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year old tech has only dropped a few percent for next year.

Veliladon 4y ago
3D NAND, which basically underpins all of our SSD tech, is hard enough to make at 40nm. They basically have to fill a tiny hole really precisely with layers of five different materials to create a vertical stack that works. It's really hard to go down node sizes plus once you hit 28nm the price of transistors stops decreasing and starts increasing instead with 22nm and smaller.
- wtallis 4y ago
  None of that is really relevant, because TSMC isn't in the business of making flash memory. The fab processes for logic and for flash memory are so different that there's no point to making comparisons between their respective nodes.
  - bob1029 4y ago
    I don't know about "no point to making comparisons", but they are definitely different animals. When I worked at Samsung, flash & LSI were like 2 different companies. Lots of reuse at the systems engineering level though. At a certain point of abstraction you can't tell what is on the wafer anymore so you might as well track it in the same database.
    - j_walter 4y ago
      Completely different animals. I know that when TSMC has looked at acquiring used fabs before and in at least one case because the fab was DRAM it was more costly and time consuming to convert it to Logic fab than just building a whole new fab.
- zeusk 4y ago
  Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
- monocasa 4y ago
  This idea that the price per transistor gets higher after 28nm needs to die. Right now the cheapest node for logic dominated chips is N6 (an optical shrink of N7). And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-revealed-300mm-wafer-at-5nm-is-nearly-dollar17000 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale...
ilyt 4y ago
This is entirely unsurprising if you actually look at things other than big CPU/GPU/IO. Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. You'd get at least one of them in every device and a bunch in any bigger device. Same with any power device, LEDs, and really anything that passes some current. Any microcontroller smaller than "runs full fledged linux" often cares about cost of production first and foremost, hell, STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! Interestingly enough, bigger node might get you worse uA/MHz but often lower idle current (the bigger things are the lower the leakage) so they might even be desirable. And the chip might want to have some mA current output on each pin (so it doesn't require external drivers to control stuff), which again means some transistor size in your I/O port is fixed and can't be made smaller so your savings from going to smaller process are not linear. For vast majority of non CPU/GPU chips it comes to cost to manufacture and those 20+ years old lines not only paid for themselves multiple times, they also have great yields. * [1] https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/ https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! STM32G0 is value-oriented. The latest-and-greatest power efficiency STM32 is the STM32U5: https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/presentation/product_presentation/group1/99/af/38/36/04/39/4c/4b/microcontrollers_stm32u5_series_product_overview/files/Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/... Which seems to be 40nm. I'm not 100% sure if the STM32U5 is the smallest node they're using. But 40nm (or better) seems like a safe bet these days.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  > Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. Is it possible to make bigger transistors using a smaller process? Just because you are using saying a 7nm process, can't you still make a transistor (like if you needed) that was the same size as it was on 90nm? I think of newer processes as merely being more precise so you could still do the old designs on them, you are just unecessarily tying up the newer machines... but concievably in the future you could just start using 5nm process to keep producing 30 nm and 90 nm chips just to consolidate production lines, non? I know nothing about this, so I'm just asking.

This is all pretty accurate. The only real surprise is that 40um tech and above are still running full steam and even the 20+ year old tech has only dropped a few percent for next year.

Veliladon 4y ago

3D NAND, which basically underpins all of our SSD tech, is hard enough to make at 40nm. They basically have to fill a tiny hole really precisely with layers of five different materials to create a vertical stack that works. It's really hard to go down node sizes plus once you hit 28nm the price of transistors stops decreasing and starts increasing instead with 22nm and smaller.

wtallis 4y ago
None of that is really relevant, because TSMC isn't in the business of making flash memory. The fab processes for logic and for flash memory are so different that there's no point to making comparisons between their respective nodes.
- bob1029 4y ago
  I don't know about "no point to making comparisons", but they are definitely different animals. When I worked at Samsung, flash & LSI were like 2 different companies. Lots of reuse at the systems engineering level though. At a certain point of abstraction you can't tell what is on the wafer anymore so you might as well track it in the same database.
  - j_walter 4y ago
    Completely different animals. I know that when TSMC has looked at acquiring used fabs before and in at least one case because the fab was DRAM it was more costly and time consuming to convert it to Logic fab than just building a whole new fab.
zeusk 4y ago
Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
monocasa 4y ago
This idea that the price per transistor gets higher after 28nm needs to die. Right now the cheapest node for logic dominated chips is N6 (an optical shrink of N7). And even then, N5 is still cheaper than N10. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-revealed-300mm-wafer-at-5nm-is-nearly-dollar17000 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmcs-wafer-prices-reveale...

ilyt 4y ago

This is entirely unsurprising if you actually look at things other than big CPU/GPU/IO. Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. You'd get at least one of them in every device and a bunch in any bigger device. Same with any power device, LEDs, and really anything that passes some current. Any microcontroller smaller than "runs full fledged linux" often cares about cost of production first and foremost, hell, STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! Interestingly enough, bigger node might get you worse uA/MHz but often lower idle current (the bigger things are the lower the leakage) so they might even be desirable. And the chip might want to have some mA current output on each pin (so it doesn't require external drivers to control stuff), which again means some transistor size in your I/O port is fixed and can't be made smaller so your savings from going to smaller process are not linear. For vast majority of non CPU/GPU chips it comes to cost to manufacture and those 20+ years old lines not only paid for themselves multiple times, they also have great yields. * [1] https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/ https://blog.st.com/stm32g0-mainstream-90-nm-mcu/

dragontamer 4y ago
> STM32 only recently [1] got on 90nm node! STM32G0 is value-oriented. The latest-and-greatest power efficiency STM32 is the STM32U5: https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/presentation/product_presentation/group1/99/af/38/36/04/39/4c/4b/microcontrollers_stm32u5_series_product_overview/files/Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf/jcr:content/translations/en.Microcontrollers_STM32U5_Series_product_overview.pdf https://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/sales_and_marketing/... Which seems to be 40nm. I'm not 100% sure if the STM32U5 is the smallest node they're using. But 40nm (or better) seems like a safe bet these days.
Pet_Ant 4y ago
> Power regulators doesn't need small transistors, it wants big nice and fat transistors. Is it possible to make bigger transistors using a smaller process? Just because you are using saying a 7nm process, can't you still make a transistor (like if you needed) that was the same size as it was on 90nm? I think of newer processes as merely being more precise so you could still do the old designs on them, you are just unecessarily tying up the newer machines... but concievably in the future you could just start using 5nm process to keep producing 30 nm and 90 nm chips just to consolidate production lines, non? I know nothing about this, so I'm just asking.