7 ms·

With all this capital investment and the physics approaching an asymptote, my gut says we're going to see fabbed chips become more commoditized in 20 years (wit

With all this capital investment and the physics approaching an asymptote, my gut says we're going to see fabbed chips become more commoditized in 20 years (with lower pricing and more competition), and I'm excited for that! Imagine if you could order a fab run as frictionless as ordering business cards.

wil421 3y ago
I thought companies were doing this for old but useful chips? There are chip manufactures who buy old fabs and then do runs for chips that go in automobiles/boats/whatever. At least, it was my assumption.
hindsightbias 3y ago
Canon's new litho might make low-volume very frictionless: https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html
doikor 3y ago
> with lower pricing and more competition Every node shrink since 7nm (some say 28nm) has increased the price per transistor. So if we keep going for smaller and smaller nodes expect prices to keep on rising. Once we reach some physical limit that we can't figure out how to solve is when you can expect prices to stagnate/lower (and progress stops too)
- dcow 3y ago
  Does this account for macroeconomic effects?
Zigurd 3y ago
Thing is, fab building, integrating production machinery, fab supply chain, and operations still has a lot of special sauce in it. Some of those factors are not affected by transistor physics converging at a limit. But, for less than cutting-edge chips, if your budget is a bit more than for printing on paper, it's getting there.
trashtester 3y ago
We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but have just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension. Chips are also quite small, limited partly by the ability to cool them once they enter a computer and partly because a single defect often means the whole chip must be discarded (which means large chips generatel lower yields). I suspect we will see much more development in all of these directions, with individual chips extending deeper into 3d and getting improved tolerance to defects allowing them to get larger, as well as with chiplet, die-2-die, stacking and similar methods of combining chips in a package continuing to move forward at a rapid pace. I don't think we should expect foundry development to stagnate in the near future. If anything, as AI starts to be used in developing new chips, it may well accelerate.
- phkahler 3y ago
  >> We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but have just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension. Nah, 3D is already well under way. Micron is stacking 232 layers of memory cells to get high density: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/article/21247462/electronic-design-3d-nand-memory-chips-stacked-high-at-micron https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic... Flash memory is also increasing the number of bits per cell by essentially going analog. So those two thing are why you can get 2 TB on your keychain. Then AMD is doing their 3D V-cache, putting a bunch L3 or L4 cache on a die stacked on top of the CPU. The issue there is that both the CPU and cache dissipate too much heat to keep stacking higher much higher. GPUs are using HBM memory which is also stacked, but again power dissipation is going to limit how far that can go. Even in low end devices - Raspberry Pi - we've had DRAM stacked on top of the SoC die for many years now. 20 Years ago 3D was seen as a way to higher levels of integration once scaling came to an end, but it's already been happening in more and more places as the end of scaling is near. Innovations will continue to squeak out slowly for some time.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    > layers Thinking in terms of layers is still essentially 2D.
coredog64 3y ago
Some semiconductor segments have been like this forever. You don’t really care who is making your LM317 voltage regulator —- it’s a straight up commodity and vendors compete on price and availability. This was the cause of a number of boom/bust cycles in semiconductors.
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  I'm also wondering whether we're in for another bust. 5ish years? Maybe the demand situation is just different this time.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    General rule: No, it's not different this time. Slightly more sophisticated rule: Yes, it's different. But it's not much different.

wil421 3y ago

I thought companies were doing this for old but useful chips? There are chip manufactures who buy old fabs and then do runs for chips that go in automobiles/boats/whatever. At least, it was my assumption.

hindsightbias 3y ago

Canon's new litho might make low-volume very frictionless: https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html

doikor 3y ago

> with lower pricing and more competition Every node shrink since 7nm (some say 28nm) has increased the price per transistor. So if we keep going for smaller and smaller nodes expect prices to keep on rising. Once we reach some physical limit that we can't figure out how to solve is when you can expect prices to stagnate/lower (and progress stops too)

dcow 3y ago
Does this account for macroeconomic effects?

Zigurd 3y ago

Thing is, fab building, integrating production machinery, fab supply chain, and operations still has a lot of special sauce in it. Some of those factors are not affected by transistor physics converging at a limit. But, for less than cutting-edge chips, if your budget is a bit more than for printing on paper, it's getting there.

trashtester 3y ago

We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but have just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension. Chips are also quite small, limited partly by the ability to cool them once they enter a computer and partly because a single defect often means the whole chip must be discarded (which means large chips generatel lower yields). I suspect we will see much more development in all of these directions, with individual chips extending deeper into 3d and getting improved tolerance to defects allowing them to get larger, as well as with chiplet, die-2-die, stacking and similar methods of combining chips in a package continuing to move forward at a rapid pace. I don't think we should expect foundry development to stagnate in the near future. If anything, as AI starts to be used in developing new chips, it may well accelerate.

phkahler 3y ago
>> We may be getting close to the limit for 2D density, but have just barely started moving in the 3rd dimension. Nah, 3D is already well under way. Micron is stacking 232 layers of memory cells to get high density: https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/article/21247462/electronic-design-3d-nand-memory-chips-stacked-high-at-micron https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded/artic... Flash memory is also increasing the number of bits per cell by essentially going analog. So those two thing are why you can get 2 TB on your keychain. Then AMD is doing their 3D V-cache, putting a bunch L3 or L4 cache on a die stacked on top of the CPU. The issue there is that both the CPU and cache dissipate too much heat to keep stacking higher much higher. GPUs are using HBM memory which is also stacked, but again power dissipation is going to limit how far that can go. Even in low end devices - Raspberry Pi - we've had DRAM stacked on top of the SoC die for many years now. 20 Years ago 3D was seen as a way to higher levels of integration once scaling came to an end, but it's already been happening in more and more places as the end of scaling is near. Innovations will continue to squeak out slowly for some time.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  > layers Thinking in terms of layers is still essentially 2D.

coredog64 3y ago

Some semiconductor segments have been like this forever. You don’t really care who is making your LM317 voltage regulator —- it’s a straight up commodity and vendors compete on price and availability. This was the cause of a number of boom/bust cycles in semiconductors.

kaycebasques 3y ago
I'm also wondering whether we're in for another bust. 5ish years? Maybe the demand situation is just different this time.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  General rule: No, it's not different this time. Slightly more sophisticated rule: Yes, it's different. But it's not much different.