IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
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Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#2So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#3So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
We're not likely to get below 3nm. We getting into the realm of making things on a feature set of a handful of atoms. It's insane we've got this far.
Then there's the matter of using this for production of large scale shipping chips. Note the POWER9 (IBM's next big chip) is expected to be produced on 14nm.
> we'd need a paradigm shift?
Yes we're coming to the end of the road for traditional CMOS chips. I don't think anyone really knows what's next as there's no clear successor.
I would speculate in the coming years we'll be seeing more performance coming from invocations in the data path for general purpose computing. Of course exploitation of massive parallelism will continue.
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#4So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
Most likely, yes:
Using light: http://gizmodo.com/a-new-light-based-transistor-could-comple...
Building on memristors: http://www.memristor.org/reference/research/13/what-are-memr...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-mysteriou...
Neural network inspiried chips: http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml
I think we will see some breakthrough after the CPU industry goes into an existential crisis about going below 5nm. Current pipelines are just so damn expensive to replace that we will see gradual innovations. For example TPU-s[1] might be a standard in a few years like GPU-s are now.
The current trends are clearly in reducing power usage and size. That alone will be a huge innovation when I can hold a "server farm" in my pocket.
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#5> EUV has been waiting in the wings for about 10 years now, always just a few months away from commercial viability. This is the best sign yet that ASML's EUV tech is finally ready for primetime.
This is the real message, because creating 5nm chips was already possible[1]. However, creating them massively on scale with the ASML EUV machines is the real challenge.
[1] https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/5080-imec-cadence-dis...
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#6So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
I strongly doubt we can even reach 1nm on a mass scale. Quantum tunneling will mess with that quite a bit: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Quantum-Tunneling-Limit-How-do...
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#7So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
1nm isn't a special number just because it is 1. A nm is one billionth of a metre which itself is an arbitrary length so 1nm is a purely arbitrary cut-off.
What you should be asking is how many molecules of silicon and silicon-germanium can be packed into the spaces being talked about at the different fabrication levels of 14nm, 10nm, 7nm, 5nm, and so on.
Once you have that information then you can ask what is the smallest number of molecules that these processes can scale down to. Only then we can start asking about physical limits and more exotic processes. Are we talking about features of 50 or 40 molecules across or what?
All I know is that 1nm is not a magic number and that predictions about the demise of transistor scaling have always turned out to be wrong. My prediction is that, as unimaginable as it seems, we'll be able to scale down to the physical limits of the materials.
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#8So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
1nm isn't a special number just because it is 1. A nm is one billionth of a metre which itself is an arbitrary length so 1nm is a purely arbitrary cut-off. What you should be asking is how many molecules of silicon and silicon-germanium can be packed into the spaces being talked about at the different fabrication levels of 14nm, 10nm, 7nm, 5nm, and so on. Once you have that information then you can ask what is the sm…
> we'll be able to scale down to the physical limits of the materials.
So that's like 1nm?
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#9So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
Node names used to refer to transistor gate length, but now they're pretty arbitrary, and gate length is typically 2x or more than node name. The "1nm" node would still have very small feature sizes though.
Re: IBM’s world-first 5nm chip indicates EUV lithography is ready for primetime
#10So, what happens when we reach 1nm? Can we go even lower or we'd need a paradigm shift?
We're not likely to get below 3nm. We getting into the realm of making things on a feature set of a handful of atoms. It's insane we've got this far. Then there's the matter of using this for production of large scale shipping chips. Note the POWER9 (IBM's next big chip) is expected to be produced on 14nm. > we'd need a paradigm shift? Yes we're coming to the end of the road for traditional CMOS chips. I don't think…
14nm? Wait, isn't the iPhone 8's A11 to be on 10nm? I can't imagine TSMC being ahead of IBM's foundry, so what's going on here? Non-technical "nm"?