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TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

anandtech.com

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Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#21

Post by variaga »

jjoonathan wrote: post #19
Zenst wrote: post #5

Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li... But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a ma…

> just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible? From what I understand, "node" in this context doesn't look like a printer resolution, it looks like a lego kit of transistors and such that TSMC has tuned to use the layer heights / counts / materials they plan to deposit. Since these details change between nodes, the 2D shapes aren't portable. You have to swap components.

You understand correctly. (Source: 20 years of asic design)

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#22

Post by [deleted] »

jjoonathan wrote: post #19
Zenst wrote: post #5

Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li... But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a ma…

> just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible? From what I understand, "node" in this context doesn't look like a printer resolution, it looks like a lego kit of transistors and such that TSMC has tuned to use the layer heights / counts / materials they plan to deposit. Since these details change between nodes, the 2D shapes aren't portable. You have to swap components.

[deleted]

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#23

Post by variaga »

pbronez wrote: post #8
Zenst wrote: post #5

Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li... But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a ma…

I'm also interested in the migration costs. Perhaps there will be a market for a migration service... though the TAM on that is probably small enough that it can't support a product-first approach.

Migration services exist today. Almost any of the ASIC backend service companies would take a contract to do a fab port. (Won't be cheap, though)

But these are services, not products. There's no one-size-fits-all way to move design Z from process X to process Y, for arbitrary values of X, Y and Z, nor is there ever likely to be.

And even once it's done, there are still costs to verify and test the results, which isn't cheap either.

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#24

Post by ajmurmann »

Zenst wrote: post #7
monocasa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not many investing in new >28nm foundries.

Russia and China may well be still developing fabs for such node sizes as they catchup. EDIT ADD https://www.techspot.com/news/94233-russia-plans-manufacture... "Russia plans to manufacture chips locally on a 28 nm node by 2030" currently they are on 90nm

I wonder if it would make sense to keep producing > 28nm with smaller margins in order to make it harder for this competition to catch up and keep a large moat.

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#25

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #9

Dumb question: if something is being manufactured on 60nm today, can you not just take the same design and start manufacturing it on 28nm? Or do you need to literally redesign the entire circuit?

An oversimplified ELI5 version is that simply shrinking the size changes the relative electrical characteristics of the pieces of the circuits which may cause the chip to no longer function correctly. This is partly because of physics, since making components of the circuit smaller and smaller affects its electrical properties and increases unwanted electrical effects, and partly because smaller processes require changes in how the chip is made which, in turn, changes the electrical properties of circuit components even if they are the same shape and size as the original.

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#26

Post by im3w1l »

monocasa wrote: post #13
pbronez wrote: post #6

How hard is it to migrate a design from 40nm to 28nm? Can this be automated?

Depends on the design. Did you throw RTL at a layout engine and let it figure it out? Pretty damn close to automated and could get to automated with a little upfront elbow grease by a company specializing in such things. Heavy analog design? It's going to be a lot more work.

How common are those two classes?

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#27

Post by drcongo »

kurthr wrote: post #11

Thanks TSMC... when will you release a HV version of 28nm? Oh... never, because you transitioned to bottom poly at 40nm. How is your automotive eFlash at 28nm... oh, you're still working on it (since 2018)? Well, guess we won't have many display drivers (or displays) or autos then, or maybe marketing should pull their heads out and smell the roses. I mean, I get it. Most things should transition to 28nm on 300mm wafe…

I honestly don't really understand 95% of what you've written here, but could this mean an end of godawful touch screens in cars?

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#28

Post by derefr »

monocasa wrote: post #13
pbronez wrote: post #6

How hard is it to migrate a design from 40nm to 28nm? Can this be automated?

Depends on the design. Did you throw RTL at a layout engine and let it figure it out? Pretty damn close to automated and could get to automated with a little upfront elbow grease by a company specializing in such things. Heavy analog design? It's going to be a lot more work.

Maybe my intuition is completely wrong here, but would the analog case be simplified if the target node+technology was chosen to have trace widths exactly 1/2 the size of the node being transitioned from?

I.e. the traces would have essentially the same standing-wave tuning requirements when modelled as waveguides; would catch a harmonic of the original frequency when acting as antennae; etc.

Re: TSMC to customers: It's time to stop using older nodes and move to 28nm

#30

Post by lovich »

kurthr wrote: post #11

Thanks TSMC... when will you release a HV version of 28nm? Oh... never, because you transitioned to bottom poly at 40nm. How is your automotive eFlash at 28nm... oh, you're still working on it (since 2018)? Well, guess we won't have many display drivers (or displays) or autos then, or maybe marketing should pull their heads out and smell the roses. I mean, I get it. Most things should transition to 28nm on 300mm wafe…

Seems like the automotive industry is gonna be the one to have to blink here. I’m not intimately involved in the details of the industry but didn’t the automotive industry already try to pass their risk onto TSMC by cancelling contracts early on into covid and we’re already told to get to the back of the line when they wanted their chip orders again?

If TSMC has enough demand to sell everything they make, they don’t really need to take specific client needs into account

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