3 ms·

Well what is 1nm measuring? The diameter of the sphere in which the combined gray brain matter of the marketing department could be squeezed into? Lithography w

• CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  It's a standardised "process" sizing established by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Originally they did correspond to actual feature sizes but since around 1997, they no longer correlate to actual sizes and are more just a marketing term that matches the same naming scheme as previously. Occassionally a given process will correspond to actual sizes but it's more out of luck than anything else.
  • bgnn 3y ago
    This isn't fully correct. Drawn 7nm is like 20nm, but effective gate length is shorter due to short channel effects. So, this numbers are almost 1-to-1 reflection of effective gate length. People mix up the transistor pitch with gate length. We can make small gate length devices but diffusion (source/drain) and contacts don't shrink as much, so we end up having a larger area needed for these.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• mappu 3y ago
  1nm is the real physical size of a transistor that you would need, to get equivalent performance characteristics, if the transistor's other layout characteristics were fixed in 1997. The divergence is because when FinFET layout was introduced, it gave as much of as improvement as a node shrink would have otherwise done. See also: AMD Athlon "3000" CPUs, clocked at only 2.x GHz, performing "as well as an equivalent" 3.0GHz Intel CPU,