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Reminder that technology nodes (5nm, 2nm, etc.) refer to the smallest feature, not some dimension of the transistor channel. For reference, a silicon atom is 0.
by apienx 3y ago
Reminder that technology nodes (5nm, 2nm, etc.) refer to the smallest feature, not some dimension of the transistor channel. For reference, a silicon atom is 0.21nm.
- Snow_Falls 3y agoThey used to refer to the smallest features, but they haven't had any real meaning for a long time now. The names of the nodes don't correspond to any physical feature of the actual transistor anymore.
- bee_rider 3y agoWe should really measure this based on density for some basic repeated structure, or something like that. Adder-density or something, haha.
- anticensor 3y agoWhat about the surface area of a basic ALU NAND gate and a basic DRAM cell?
- audunw 3y agoWho cares? It's not like most of us are designing logic gate cells for chips. The transistor dimensions are irrelevant to us. I really don't understand why this keeps getting brought up. It's not even an interesting fact. When the chip manufacturing industry started finding other ways to increase logic density, improve timing, reduce power consumption, etc, they just started bumping down the "nm" number to indicate the improved performance, in a similar way as reducing the transistor gate length would have done before. Simple as that.