Re:Apple and Intel first to use TSMC 3nm
by MayeulC on Monday July 05, 2021 @04:09AM
(#27735638)
Sorry, I should have been clearer that I was specifically talking about gate length.
Transistor size (occupied area) decreases, but that's mainly because FinFET uses vertical gates, not planar technology, so you can stack them closer (well, it also has other advantages).
Thanks for the links, that's an interesting website. If you look at the 10nm one, they explicitly call out what I said, and write 20nm for gate length (tunneling losses start increasing a lot if you reduce that, so I'm not sure how to read the 7nm page, maybe they got it wrong?)
We're not getting smaller, not that we couldn't (e-beam and ALD give us atomic resolution), but because it's useless (at that point, gate leakage and doping issues become hard to overcome).
Instead we're improving precision, and our control along the 3rd dimension. Integration technologies are also progressing: flip-chip, TSVs. That will allow features like integrated HBM, on-chip lasers and photonics circuits, etc.
Transistor size (occupied area) decreases, but that's mainly because FinFET uses vertical gates, not planar technology, so you can stack them closer (well, it also has other advantages).
Thanks for the links, that's an interesting website. If you look at the 10nm one, they explicitly call out what I said, and write 20nm for gate length (tunneling losses start increasing a lot if you reduce that, so I'm not sure how to read the 7nm page, maybe they got it wrong?)
In any case, process node once reffered to gate length; it doesn't anymore: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
We're not getting smaller, not that we couldn't (e-beam and ALD give us atomic resolution), but because it's useless (at that point, gate leakage and doping issues become hard to overcome). Instead we're improving precision, and our control along the 3rd dimension. Integration technologies are also progressing: flip-chip, TSVs. That will allow features like integrated HBM, on-chip lasers and photonics circuits, etc.