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IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

nytimes.com

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Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#121

Post by tedsanders »

ars wrote: post #119
timboslice wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where 450mm wafers and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in. EUV relieves the need for double patterning and the tremendous additional costs that entails (and was used to manufacture this 7nm chip). The CEO of Applied Materials, Gary Dickerson, has stated that the 450mm wafer timeline “has definitely been pushed out from a timing standpoint.” That’s incredibly important, because the…

> and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in I wonder if they could use electrons instead of light to etch the surface.

Electron-beam lithography is a technique that works, but because it's very slow, it's also very expensive. There are efforts to parallelize e-beam writing, but they face hard challenges. For example, if you want to pattern faster, you just need to shoot more electrons. But if you shoot too many electrons, they repel each other and the pattern blurs. It's a difficult problem to overcome, but people are working on it.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#122

Post by [deleted] »

mikeyouse wrote: post #89
vegabook wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that most semiconductor predictions come true, whereas biomed predictions are much less reliable. Unfortunately, that is a reflection on the latter's practitioners as they are aware of their poor odds yet still publish.

I think this is unfair. Scientists often have a narrow-scope breakthrough in an extremely technical area and when they're asked to dumb it down for a wider audience, the tech press / university PR team runs wild. Something like curing diabetes is going to taken hundreds or thousands of small incremental improvements and breakthroughs so when they say "Could lead to a cure!!" they're usually correct but the nuance is…

[deleted]

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#123

Post by QuantumRoar »

joshuapants wrote: post #83
QuantumRoar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

III-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide have a high mobility and are probably tested right now in Research labs around the world for CMOS-transistors (it is already in use for something like solar panels). But there's always the problem of how to scale these things as well as silicon based manufacturing. Further out is still some stuff like graphene or carbon nanotubes. Of course, the structure of the transistor i…

Could the vacuum channel transistor[1] also be a contender? [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-...

There's no one way forward. A lot of things might happen and it will only be decided once a company actually ships a new and viable technology.

Remember what Intel did with the FinFETs. It was the same discussion then (What could the next thing be? III-V, SOI, blabla?). At one point, Intel simply came on stage, surprised us with FinFETs and everybody was like: "I guess it's FinFET, then." The idea of FinFETs is actually from the 90s or so. The sole reason why noone did it before is because noone could actually build them at scale (AFAIK, Intel is still the only company that ships FinFETs).

Keep in mind that manufacturing is very hard. It is very unlikely that there will be more than incremental steps. Just changing the channel material is already quite the task.

Also, don't believe any "This is the next transistor!" stuff. You can find these things a lot but they rarely mean more than some department trying to make a bit of publicity.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#124

Post by QuantumRoar »

timelined wrote: post #110
QuantumRoar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

III-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide have a high mobility and are probably tested right now in Research labs around the world for CMOS-transistors (it is already in use for something like solar panels). But there's always the problem of how to scale these things as well as silicon based manufacturing. Further out is still some stuff like graphene or carbon nanotubes. Of course, the structure of the transistor i…

IBM was one of the first big companies to develop/commercialize SOI technologies.

SOI is better than the planar design since you can fully deplete the channel. But it's worse than FinFETs when you consider the control of the gate on the channel and when it comes to thermals. The oxide below the channel also acts as a thermal isolator. So the heat can't be transported away as efficiently.

The upside of SOI is that it's easier to manufacture. That's why we see so much of it around (AFAIK, GlobalFoundries and TSMC still do it).

But the actual way forward is the FinFET. The 7nm chip from the article is actually built with FinFETs. Otherwise that thing would probably not work very well.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#125

Post by vegabook »

mikeyouse wrote: post #89
vegabook wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that most semiconductor predictions come true, whereas biomed predictions are much less reliable. Unfortunately, that is a reflection on the latter's practitioners as they are aware of their poor odds yet still publish.

I think this is unfair. Scientists often have a narrow-scope breakthrough in an extremely technical area and when they're asked to dumb it down for a wider audience, the tech press / university PR team runs wild. Something like curing diabetes is going to taken hundreds or thousands of small incremental improvements and breakthroughs so when they say "Could lead to a cure!!" they're usually correct but the nuance is…

There is no excuse for publishing anything that does not stand up to replicability and a significantly high enough threshold chance that published prediction will be realised. Hence the OP is correct in pointing out the unfairness of equating comparatively reliable semiconductor process improvement predictions with the relative dartboard that is biotech.

If third parties ("PR") hijack the truth, it is up to the researcher publicly to denounce them.

If, as I suspect, such denunciation is bad for a researcher's funding, then we have a problem in research, if indeed, in such circumstances, it can even be called research (as opposed to, say, "marketing").

Clearly biotech is a younger field than semiconductors, and it should be given a wide berth to make mistakes without prejudice, but that does not exonerate it from explicitly communicating the expected uncertainty of its results.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#126

Post by ant6n »

api wrote: post #99
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for comparison, scale fans, let's remember that we're talking about making 7nm features on wafers that are nearly a foot and a half wide, using near-as-dammit x-ray wavelengths. A few teething problems would be expected. 7nm has been struggling for a while, 5nm is likely to be late, and I don't think anyone really knows what happens after that. Longer term, industrial manufacture is probably going to have to move…

... and why would we invest the money to do that when there is not enough (software-driven) demand for that performance. The average person uses PCs and mobile devices to browse the web, write documents, order an Uber, and maybe play games. Nothing much is being done on the software front that challenges current systems. Maybe if VR took off or we got home applications for AI like domestic robotics that would change.…

GPUs are basically as big as possible, and still can't really render at 4K. Now if I want to have a ray-traced Game Engine, fuggetaboutit.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#127

Post by pault »

pjc50 wrote: post #62
icanhackit wrote: post #46

Time to start working on the 7km chip. Fibre everywhere, content delivery servers everywhere, game servers out the wazoo so my crappy media streaming gadget or VR headset can remotely pull in the latest movies and games in 4K with minimal lag. You could outfit a few of the world's major cities for the cost of a new fab. Unfortunately this won't sell new consumer hardware on an regular basis.

OnLive tried the games streaming thing and failed.

I used OnLive and really enjoyed it, for the most part. I think it was just ahead of its time. I personally would rather stream from a render farm than lug a big noisy gaming tower around. I think this model will be tried again successfully in the near future.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#128

Post by graycat »

timelined wrote: post #111
graycat wrote: post #33

As I recall, there is microelectronics fab work in Taiwan, South Korea, and, in the US, at IBM and Intel, at least. And maybe China and Russia are trying to get caught up in fabs. I wonder: What organization, really, is mostly responsible for the newer fabs? I mean, do each of Samsung, Intel, IBM, etc. do everything on their own? Or is there a main company, maybe Applied Materials, with some help from, say, some smal…

IBM/Intel/Samsung buy tools from various companies. By "tools", I really mean huge pieces of instrumentation that cost many (tens to hundreds) millions of dollars from other companies that are used for the various processing steps (deposition/growth of materials on wafers, patterning resists, etching, etc). The development of each of these tools is immensely difficult and challenging and making them talk to each othe…

How much is like turn key and how much is lots of one off, proprietary engineering and system integration?

I was guessing that maybe for the fabs themselves, mostly there was some one company that delivered fabs. Or, why reinvent the wheel several times?

Sure, for the chip design, say, by Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, IBM, that's a lot of design software, know how, etc. And, sure, QC has to be one heck of an Excedrin headache but with likely some long standing basic ideas for testability.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#129

Post by tracker1 »

rasz_pl wrote: post #96
tracker1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that AMDs designs are particularly bad... an FX-8350 can go toe to toe with a higher end i5. Of course that's without the power savings of a newer process. I do hope that AMD comes up with something with a single-core performance competitive to an i7 with a power envelope in the ballpark.

>single-core performance competitive to an i7 best AMD chip cant even compete with cheapest Pentium(celeron) when it comes to IPC

But it will support 32GB of ECC ram and more than two simultaneous processes. ;-)
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