> A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left.
That's still something like a hundred thousand to a million times smaller that what we can actually fabricate, right?
Re:Intel is dying and we can’t save it
by monocasa on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @11:03PM
(#25771821)
You also can't make a transistor out of a single atom. The fact that you need doped silicon to have a semiconductor rather than just silicon as an insulator means that we'll be cut off well before then. A ~50x reduction in feature size (so that's 6ish nodes of shrink) is about what I've heard about industry expectations.
That being said the future never ceases to surprise.
That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one.
A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left.
After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic equivalent at the time, and literally just leaking info publicly so the EU, US, and ROK are viable replacements once chips become truly a commodity will cut the dependence on Taiwan. At that point it's not worth facing China's nukes to tell them that they can't have Crimea^H^H^H^H^H^H Taiwan.