Their gamble however is that they need to figure out DSA, a long storied technology that uses self-forming polymers to allow less light to sharply etch smaller features.
If they figure out DSA, they will likely be ahead of TSMC. If not, it will just be more very expensive languishing.
This is the industry roadmap from 2022: https://irds.ieee.org/images/files/pdf/2022/2022IRDS_Litho.p... If you look at page 6 there is a nice table that kind of explains it.
Certain feature sizes have hit a point of diminishing returns, so they are finding new ways to increase performance. Each generation is better than the last but we have moved beyond simple shrinkage.
Comparing Intel’s 14A label to TSMCs 16A is meaningless without performance benchmarks. They are both just marketing terms. Like the Intel/AMD CPU wars. You can’t say one is better because the label says it’s faster. There’s so much other stuff to consider.
If Intel pulls off DSA, they will be using a newer generation of technology compared to TSMC using an optimized older generation. Could TSMC still make better chips? Maybe. But Intel will likely be better.
Is Intel working on "an optimized older generation" as a backup plan? I don't follow semiconductors very closely, but my impression is the reason they're "behind" is they bet aggressively on an advanced technology that didn't pan out.
If that's the actual root cause, then Intel's lagging is due to optimizing their balance sheets (investors like low capital expenditures) at the expense of their technology dominance.
Dsa is one of many patterning assist technologies, just...an old one. Neat, but not 'new'. You use patterning assist to make smaller, more regular features, which is exactly what the 16a vs 18a refers to.
That has somewhat less to do with performance, which is tied as much to material, stress, and interface parameters. Nothing gets better from being smaller in the post dennard scaling era, the work of integration is making better devices anyway.
Patterning choices imply different consequences. For example,.a.double euv integration can take advantage of spacer assists to reduce ler and actually improve cdu even with a double expose. Selective etch can improve bias, spacer trickery can create uniquely small regular features that cannot be done with single patterns. Conversely, overlay trees get bushier, and via CD variance can cause horrific electrical variance. It is complicated, history dependent, and everything is on the developmental edge.
To the best of my knowledge, DSA never made it out of the lab.
Very interesting document - lots of numbers in there for real feature sizes that I had not seen before (Table LITH-1).
And this snippet was particularly striking:
Chip making in Taiwan already uses as much as 10% of the island’s electricity.
Earlier it was AMD. The most prominent era since their Athlon XP CPUs turned out to be noticeably more performant per GHz than Intel in 2001.
It is my understanding that only ASML had cracked the EUV litography, but if there's another company out there, that would be an interesting development to watch.
Ackshually, EUV was cracked by Sandia Labs research in the US, with EUV light sources built by Cymer in the US. ASML was the only one allowed to license the tech and integrate it into their steppers after they bough Cymer in 2013. Hence why US has veto rights to whom Dutch based ASML can sell their EUV steppers to, as in not to China, despite ow much ASML shareholders would like that extra Chinese money.
https://www.asml.com/en/news/stories/2022/making-euv-lab-to-...
There's no such thing in capitalism. Limited supply semi is(was) a bidding war, where China had a blank cheque and was willing to outbid everyone else to secure semi manufacturing supremacy.
Do you think Intel or TSMC could have scored all that ASML supply at that price if China would have been allowed to bid as well? ASML would have been able to score way higher market prices per stepper had China been allowed in the game, and therefore higher profits.
Do you think ASML shareholders hate higher profits or what? Nvidia sure didn't during the pandemic. You wanted a GPU? Great, it would cost you now 2x-3x the original MSRP because free market capitalism and the laws of supply and demand.
More like it was started. There were a ton of gnarly problems left that took over ten years and billions of € to solve.
Producing a few flashes of EUV and getting a few photons on the target is relatively easy. Producing a lot of EUV for a long time and getting a significant fraction (...like 1%) of the photons on the target is very hard.
ps. Intel used to own 15% of ASML in 2012, now they own less than 2%.
If you think of an SOC, the chip in your phone, more and more of the real estate is being dedicated to specialized compute (AI accelerators, GPUs, etc. vs general purpose compute (CPU).
At the enterprise scale, one of the big arguments NVIDIA has been making, beyond their value in the AI market, has been the value of moving massive, resource intense workloads from CPU to more specialized GPU acceleration. In return for the investment to move their workload, customers can get a massive increase in performance per watt/dollar.
There are some other factors at play in that example, and it may not always be true that the transistors/mm^2 is always lower, but I think it illustrates the overall point.
Basically, every single credit card sized security chip (including actual credit cards, of course) is a small processor running Java applets. Pretty much everyone has one or more in their wallet. I'd assume those were actual Java CPUs directly executing bytecode?
Not sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_processor doesn't seem to mention any in current use. I am ignorant of the actual correct answer: I had simply presumed it is simpler to write the virtual machine using a commercial ISA than to develop a custom ISA.
Java Card bytecode run by the Java Card Virtual Machine is a functional subset of Java 2 bytecode run by a standard Java Virtual Machine but with a different encoding to optimize for size.
Patriot Scientific's Ignite processor family https://www.cpushack.com/2013/03/02/chuck-moore-part-2-from-...
ARM Jazelle technology https://developer.arm.com/documentation/ddi0222/b/introducti...
https://www.eetimes.com/nazomi-offers-plug-in-java-accelerat...
It's all dot-com era stuff and Sun Microsystems also created a Java OS that could run directly on hardware without a host operating system.
That's about it
Not to say that improvements and doing more with less are impossible, they probably aren't, but it's going to require significant per design human effort to do that.
There are the really obvious ones like on-board GPUs and AI accelerators, but even within the CPU you have optimizations that apply to specific kinds of workloads like specialized instructions for video encode/decode.
The main "issue", such as it is, is that this setup advantages vertically integrated players - the ones who can release software quickly to use these optimizations, or even going as far as to build specific new features on top of these optimizations.
For more open platforms you have a chicken-and-egg problem. Chip designers have little incentive to dedicate valuable and finite transistors to specialized computations if the software market in general hasn't shown an interest. Even after these optimizations/specialized hardware have been released, software makers often are slow in adopting them, resulting in consumers not seeing the benefit for a long time.
See for example the many years it took for Microsoft to even accelerate the rendering of Windows' core UI with the GPU.
Gallons per mile only makes sense when you are talking about dragsters.
incidentally, this is the measure rest of the world is advertising, except usually in liters per 100km.
there's a good reason for this: comparisons linear instead of inversely proportional. 6l/100km is 50% better than 9l/100km. 30mpg vs 20mpg is... not as simple.
How so?
I guess it's a matter of approach. Europeans are traveling familiar, constant distances and worry about fuel cost. Americans just fill up their tank and worry how far they can go :)
"Quick, which is better: Replacing an 18-mpg car with a 28-mpg one, or going from a 34-mpg car to one that returns 50 mpg? Researchers at Duke University say that drivers find it easier to select the right answer when efficiency is expressed as gallons per 100 miles (g/100m).
So 18 mpg (or 5.5 g/100m) versus 28 mpg (3.6 g/100m)--an increase of 10 mpg--represents a 52 percent reduction in consumption.
If you trade in a car rated at 34 mpg for one rated at 50 mpg, its a 16-mpg improvement, so we ought to see those gas card bills plummeting, right? Actually, after a minute's worth of math, you'll get 2.9g/100m in the 34-mpg car and 2g/100m in the 50-mpg car--only half as big a gain as the original scenario. "
And, to think, it's all done with light !
We live in interesting times !
230 M/mm2 translates to 33nm "half-pitch".
Of course, transistors aren't square and aren't so densely packed, but these numbers are more real IMO.
Would it be that x2 (for front & back)?
E.g., 230 on front side and another 230 on back side = 460 MTr/mm2 TOTAL