4 ms·
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
by 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 agoNone 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 agoI 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 agoCompletely 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 agoMicron, Samsung and SK Hynix are doing volume production of 1xnm QLC devices with further complexity like CuA.
- monocasa 4y agoThis 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...