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Great! Hopefully we can get 10 year behind technology from small fabs. There's so much you can do with a laptop from 2016

deleted 4mo ago
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pulse7 4mo ago
With electron-beam lithography you can build transistors with gate lengths down to 1 to 3 nanometers.
- adrian_b 4mo ago
  Using electron-beam lithography, you can define features of that size on a silicon wafer. Silicon transistors with such gate lengths would not work, because the too short gate could not close the conduction channel (the minimum gate length with silicon is likely to be greater than 10 nm, even with gate-around transistors). The masks used for deep UV lithography or for any other kind of high-resolution lithography are also made with electron-beam lithography. Therefore it is obvious that anything that you can do in a form of lithography that uses masks you can do with electron-beam lithography. Using directly electron-beam lithography skips the production of masks and their use. This is a huge cost reduction in the cost of processing a single wafer (which may have hundreds or thousands of chips). However the processing throughput is orders of magnitude lower than when using masks. For very high-volume production, the costs of the masks and of the deep UV lithography are divided over millions or billions of chips, so they are reduced to a reasonable fraction of the cost, which is compensated by the high productivity.
phonon 4mo ago
Global Foundries has lots of fabs with 10 year old+ processes....
adrian_b 4mo ago
No, you misunderstood. A small fab that uses electron-beam lithography can do everything that TSMC can do, and in a much simpler way. Its problems are not technical, but economical. The costs of producing chips are much lower than for TSMC, but the production rate is also orders of magnitude lower. So they can be used only to produce prototypes or devices for niche applications, where the small quantities needed would never allow them to be produced at a big fab. On the other hand, if such small fabs could be themselves mass produced, so that their cost could become low enough, then using a great number of such small fabs could satisfy the requirements in semiconductor devices and ICs of most not too big countries, and this style of production would be greatly preferable to what exists today as the end point of a long chain of acquisitions and mergers, that has resulted in a handful of SOTA manufacturers in the entire world. Ideally, there would still exist big fabless IC design companies, like Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, but they would design for a standardized CMOS fabrication process, not for a proprietary process with secret design rules, like those of TSMC. Then such designs would be licensed for production in distributed small fabs. Only such a system would remove the dependence of the entire world on a quasi-monopolistic system of production, where the destruction of a single fab could cripple most of the world.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

pulse7 4mo ago

With electron-beam lithography you can build transistors with gate lengths down to 1 to 3 nanometers.

adrian_b 4mo ago
Using electron-beam lithography, you can define features of that size on a silicon wafer. Silicon transistors with such gate lengths would not work, because the too short gate could not close the conduction channel (the minimum gate length with silicon is likely to be greater than 10 nm, even with gate-around transistors). The masks used for deep UV lithography or for any other kind of high-resolution lithography are also made with electron-beam lithography. Therefore it is obvious that anything that you can do in a form of lithography that uses masks you can do with electron-beam lithography. Using directly electron-beam lithography skips the production of masks and their use. This is a huge cost reduction in the cost of processing a single wafer (which may have hundreds or thousands of chips). However the processing throughput is orders of magnitude lower than when using masks. For very high-volume production, the costs of the masks and of the deep UV lithography are divided over millions or billions of chips, so they are reduced to a reasonable fraction of the cost, which is compensated by the high productivity.

phonon 4mo ago

Global Foundries has lots of fabs with 10 year old+ processes....

adrian_b 4mo ago

No, you misunderstood. A small fab that uses electron-beam lithography can do everything that TSMC can do, and in a much simpler way. Its problems are not technical, but economical. The costs of producing chips are much lower than for TSMC, but the production rate is also orders of magnitude lower. So they can be used only to produce prototypes or devices for niche applications, where the small quantities needed would never allow them to be produced at a big fab. On the other hand, if such small fabs could be themselves mass produced, so that their cost could become low enough, then using a great number of such small fabs could satisfy the requirements in semiconductor devices and ICs of most not too big countries, and this style of production would be greatly preferable to what exists today as the end point of a long chain of acquisitions and mergers, that has resulted in a handful of SOTA manufacturers in the entire world. Ideally, there would still exist big fabless IC design companies, like Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, but they would design for a standardized CMOS fabrication process, not for a proprietary process with secret design rules, like those of TSMC. Then such designs would be licensed for production in distributed small fabs. Only such a system would remove the dependence of the entire world on a quasi-monopolistic system of production, where the destruction of a single fab could cripple most of the world.