Many semiconductor manufacturers have folded, dropped out, or merged over the years due to costs putting development of the next node out of their reach. If the remaining 3 drop out of the race, they will be following the same pattern as many before.
Maybe it will make sense for mobile SoCs or some other energy constrained applications which benefit from lower power draw of smaller process node chips. But power efficiency can outweigh lower absolute performance only to some degree.
I'm not talking about the marginal cost to make the device, I'm talking about the R&D and capital expenditure to develop and build the machines for the next node.
You can be reductive and say it always boils down to competition, but then you would also say that ultimately shrinking will end when it can no longer compete with mature nodes. Competition in both cases. So I'm not sure what exactly that's getting at.
> If it soon goes up significantly, it will stop to make economic sense to increase transistor density any further. Why pay the same amount of money for a less powerful chip?
That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from.
> That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from.
Apple can't increase the price of their product arbitrarily. So if the price per performance increases, the new iPhone would be slower than the old one. Maybe people will still buy it if it has better power efficiency, but that is a trade-off which has its limits.
Not arbitrarily, but IIRC Apple's profit margin on iPhones is over 100% - the iPhone 14 Pro max is supposed to have a BoM cost of ~470 $ and retails for well over 1000$. That means Apple can both afford the high upfront premium/R&D cost of going to a smaller node and to eat up higher SoC costs and yet still have a profit per unit that would lead most other companies' CFOs to drool.
On top of that, even if the economics should not work out for mobile... a fully spec'd out M2 Ultra Mac Pro runs at ~14.000$, Intel ones IIRC could reach 50.000$. The crowd that pays such absurd prices has zero problems paying a grand or two more for higher performance.
No, why? Lots of foundries out there that don't compete on leading edge nodes.
> Apple can't increase the price of their product arbitrarily. So if the price per performance increases, the new iPhone would be slower than the old one. Maybe people will still buy it if it has better power efficiency, but that is a trade-off which has its limits.
That doesn't address what I said -- that price per transistor is not the single limiting factor. I never said any performance increase is worth infinite value.
The discussion was about Moore's law ("scaling down"), which is only about the leading edge.
No, the point was that the leading edge will stop advancing when it can no longer compete economically with companies that sell mature nodes. Which is obvious, but I was just being similarly reductive.
> The point is that they will stop scaling chips before technical limits are reached.
Sure, like most commercial ventures, cost becomes prohibitive at some point and overtakes benefits. As it always has been.
The "mature node" here will just be the one before the first node that doesn't make economic sense anymore. And this will be from a leading edge company, most likely TSMC. Say, if 2nm is too expensive compared to 3nm, then TSMC will stick with 3nm.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/937966/0000937966220...
But when it comes to cost, evidently replacing many passes and other complicated processes with DUV machines with fewer EUV passes is a net win. And the energy required to create these chips must be a small fraction of the energy they will use in their lifetimes, so improved efficiency of the smaller nodes enabled by EUV would surely be a win, all else being equal.
Aren't those tuneable to any wavelength down to X-rays?
> Wavelength 0.05 to 4.7 nanometres
- https://www.xfel.eu/facility/overview/facts_amp_figures/inde...
which is sufficient and possibly excessive.
Not that I know anything about any of the other considerations in such things. Is 3.4 km "too big"? Is €1.22 bn "too expensive"?
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.35848/1347-4065/acc18c
> This form of maskless lithography has high resolution but low throughput, limiting its usage to photomask fabrication, low-volume production of semiconductor devices, and research and development. [1]
The beam has to scan across the entire wafer instead of exposing it all at once, so it's extremely slow and uneconomical for mass production.
You could conceive of making the speed up in parallel production.
F... yeah!
Kind of like (iirc) the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope might be used to pick up & manipulate individual atoms.
Self-organizing materials like DNA might make that process easier, not scale it down further.
>Hynix reported at the 2009 EUV Symposium that the wall plug efficiency was ~0.02% for EUV, i.e., to get 200-watts at intermediate focus for 100 wafers-per-hour, one would require 1-megawatt of input power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...
It's an damn good question of how much further this can scale. EUV photons are a lot more like x-rays than they are visible light. They're energetic enough now they're inflicting ionization effects on mask material, blurring the exposed area with secondary electron scatter. The fundamental limit of electronic transistors, ones made out of single molecules, are going to be tough to make with lithography.