31–40 of 132 posts
Samsung has a dishonorable marketing department. 3nm is not actually 3nm. I'm fed up... OLED is superior so they had to take the path of calling theirs QLED which is actually just an LCD screen with phosphors on top of a blue backlight (and it's nothing new).
What is the best metric nowadays? Dhrystones/MIPS/FLOPS per MHz/Watt per square inch? As a complete outsider, millions of transistors per square inch sounds like a very intuitive metric of how small things are.
At what point does quantum tunnelling become a problem?
Gate leakage is the phenomenon of quantum tunneling through the gate dielectric barrier and started appearing as gate dielectrics became thinner and thinner. Gate leakage was mitigated by moving to higher k dielectrics (from silicon dioxide, SiO2, to more exotic materials that include other elements such as Hafnium).
Higher k dielectrics allow for the same capacitance per unit area and channel control with a thicker physical gate compared to plain SiO2, reducing gate leakage. This technology change came along with metal gates (which used to be polysilicon) and were a combined advance that Intel incorporated a few years before before TSMC, IIRC circa 2008.
This is a circuit designer's perspective. Someone who actually understands device physics and material properties can chime in to correct me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First though, "5nm", "3nm" and so on are just marketing names. There is nothing about "5nm" that makes it "5nm" other than the company in question saying it is. Some things are smaller than 5nm on a given 5nm node, and some are larger. I cannot recall exactly what node this started to be the case (there used to be an actual definition, one for DRAM, one for logic), but it was in the past two decades and got particula…
>but it was in the past two decades and got particularly ridiculous beginning around "28nm" up to now. I wonder if that is some kind of cultural shift that is taking place that started around 2009, or if it's always been like this and I just never noticed. BMW model numbers used to more or less accurately reflect engine sizes, not anymore, it's just numbers now. 2G, 3G, 4G used to mean something, not anymore. I could…
Samsung has a dishonorable marketing department. 3nm is not actually 3nm. I'm fed up... OLED is superior so they had to take the path of calling theirs QLED which is actually just an LCD screen with phosphors on top of a blue backlight (and it's nothing new).
What is the best metric nowadays? Dhrystones/MIPS/FLOPS per MHz/Watt per square inch? As a complete outsider, millions of transistors per square inch sounds like a very intuitive metric of how small things are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The design of EUV lasers is already completely absurd. It's an awesome piece of engineering, but it's no easier to push the laser wavelength downwards than anything else.
Does the lithography require the tight wavelength or other nice properties of lasers? I had thought they used filtered synchrotron output since a while ago. Basically everything about the process is absurd, not sure why pushing on the light source is less feasible then any of the other knobs
At some point it’s switching from ‘lots of wiffle balls in a stream’ to ‘high power machine gun fire’, and the physical properties of everything involved become very limiting.
At what point does quantum tunnelling become a problem?
It already has been a problem in terms of gate leakage, although largely mitigated by material improvements. Gate leakage is the phenomenon of quantum tunneling through the gate dielectric barrier and started appearing as gate dielectrics became thinner and thinner. Gate leakage was mitigated by moving to higher k dielectrics (from silicon dioxide, SiO2, to more exotic materials that include other elements such as Ha…
At what point does quantum tunnelling become a problem?
It already has been a problem in terms of gate leakage, although largely mitigated by material improvements. Gate leakage is the phenomenon of quantum tunneling through the gate dielectric barrier and started appearing as gate dielectrics became thinner and thinner. Gate leakage was mitigated by moving to higher k dielectrics (from silicon dioxide, SiO2, to more exotic materials that include other elements such as Ha…
Samsung has a dishonorable marketing department. 3nm is not actually 3nm. I'm fed up... OLED is superior so they had to take the path of calling theirs QLED which is actually just an LCD screen with phosphors on top of a blue backlight (and it's nothing new).
What is the best metric nowadays? Dhrystones/MIPS/FLOPS per MHz/Watt per square inch? As a complete outsider, millions of transistors per square inch sounds like a very intuitive metric of how small things are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First though, "5nm", "3nm" and so on are just marketing names. There is nothing about "5nm" that makes it "5nm" other than the company in question saying it is. Some things are smaller than 5nm on a given 5nm node, and some are larger. I cannot recall exactly what node this started to be the case (there used to be an actual definition, one for DRAM, one for logic), but it was in the past two decades and got particula…
>but it was in the past two decades and got particularly ridiculous beginning around "28nm" up to now. I wonder if that is some kind of cultural shift that is taking place that started around 2009, or if it's always been like this and I just never noticed. BMW model numbers used to more or less accurately reflect engine sizes, not anymore, it's just numbers now. 2G, 3G, 4G used to mean something, not anymore. I could…
So, yeah. This is nothing new. Marketers gonna market.
Samsung has a dishonorable marketing department. 3nm is not actually 3nm. I'm fed up... OLED is superior so they had to take the path of calling theirs QLED which is actually just an LCD screen with phosphors on top of a blue backlight (and it's nothing new).
Cool. I'm excited to get another Samsung phone. Suit yourself.