61–70 of 87 posts
HBM2 is like 2Tb/s, how is HBM3 7GB/s ?
The HBM2 total memory bandwidth is like 2TB/s, just different scale
Anyway I could totally be using wrong nomenclature and terminology, feel free to discuss, these aren't assertions or aren’t strongly held assertions
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You would love to see computers become harder to program?
It canbe nice to have the opportunity to program something harder but faster. Counter example: Itanium, which was too hard to program (compilers) for.
HBM might be an interesting idea. I would love to see multiple bandwidth levels of memory becoming a norm, with computers a very fast small amount of memory, and a larger set of DRR4 or DRR5. We already have multiple levels of cache, why not having multiple levels of RAM? Operating systems and software would need to accommodate a new reality where NUMA is the norm though. But it’s good that we even have the concept o…
You would love to see computers become harder to program?
I know they're separate lines and capacity is sold well in advance and all that, but this chip shortage still baffles me. A startup can tape out a 5 nm chip, but STMicroelectronics can't make any of their 40-130 nm microcontrollers for the next year? Also car companies are supposedly the culprit, even though their volume is only in the low tens of millions per year, and the dustup is apparently over only six months o…
How did SiFive get anywhere near 5nm TSMC?
They pay money just like any other customer of TSMC. SiFive has a lot of buzz in the industry. I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC wanted to work with them. But there are other intermediary companies that help startups group multiple chips from multiple companies together into a single mask. This is called a "shuttle" and allows the companies to split the costs of the masks (I've heard up to $30 million for 5nm) SiFive…
Pretty classic "commoditize your complement".
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Thousands to tens of thousands per car? I think you're off by an order of magnitude.
I know a typical Mercedes has roughly a hundred individual computers, not too far reached to think the average chip count could be 10 or higher per device on the can bus.
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Indeed yes I meant cells, I'm not a native English speaker. > At electric-car scales, you have thousands-and-thousands of cells. You can't just manage all of them with one IC, so you build an IC per bundle. Maybe 48 cells or 100-cells per IC or so. Ah okay, I had more expected something on the order of 1 IC per 4 cells to allow individual cell health monitoring.
> Indeed yes I meant cells, I'm not a native English speaker. You're doing fine. Native English speakers don't know the difference between cell or battery either. This is more of a precise / technical engineering distinction. * 9V Battery ( https://imgur.com/FHJdhIK ), a collection of 6x cells. * AAAA Cell (one singular chemical reaction of 1.5V) Notice that the imgur is wrong: they call it a AAAA battery (when the p…
Which is a collection of fins.
An electrical battery is called akkumulator.
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High voltage MOSFETs and IGBTs are built on a completely different process. Size is definitely not an issue with them. It is about exotic doping to create the desired characteristics. They're built using much larger feature sizes but on completely separate lines.
I'm not really in the industry. But I know that high-voltage MOSFETs / IGBTs need substantial amounts of current to turn on / off adequately. Under typical use, there's a dedicated chip called a "Gate Driver" that provides that current, between a microcontroller and the IGBT. Its not that the IGBT / MOSFETs are built on these microcontrollers. Its that the Gate-Driver can be integrated into a microcontroller (simplif…
They also have to be located close to the IGBT and the designers would want it as a separate part because it gives them enormous flexibility. You aren't saving much by adding a gate driver to a micro and I can't think of any micro that has it integrated. There are simple things like motor drivers, etc. that may have a gate driver integrated but that's not a micro and those are also built on large nodes -- much larger than nodes used for microcontrollers.
FWIW: I design advanced node (20-5nm) ASICs for a living, and have designed on older nodes before. I've also worked in power electronics.
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Almost everything in a car has a number of chips. Power regulations, communication buses... and in electric cars with thousands of batteries, at least one chip per battery for protection.
Electric cars have ONE battery with thousands of *cells*. I do realize that the colloquial term for "cell" is "battery" (ex: an AA cell is called a battery), but it becomes important to be precise with our words when talking about manufacturing. Small scale Li-ion does a protection-IC per cell (ex: cell phones), mostly because cell phones are so small they only use one cell. Larger scale Li-ion, such as Laptop batter…
How did SiFive get anywhere near 5nm TSMC?
They pay money just like any other customer of TSMC. SiFive has a lot of buzz in the industry. I wouldn't be surprised that TSMC wanted to work with them. But there are other intermediary companies that help startups group multiple chips from multiple companies together into a single mask. This is called a "shuttle" and allows the companies to split the costs of the masks (I've heard up to $30 million for 5nm) SiFive…