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Comment by tormeh | Hacker News Reader

>It is also surprising to me to see how far Intel has fallen from the process lead they had. First with HKMG by several years, first with FinFet by several year, I suppose they are still first to do cobalt interconnect but in terms of process density the foundries have caught them and appear poised to take a substantial lead over the next several years.

>With Intel offering foundry processes and GF, Samung and TSMC all offering leading edge processes the industry now has four viable leading edge process options.

Exciting times.

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Indeed. Intel finally having some really competitive competitors (as it were) is great to see.

I was going to mutter about this great competition coming from overseas and being an example of the Decline Of The West, but Global Foundries appears to be a mainly US+Europe based thing. (I know it span out of AMD a while back but had assumed until just now that it did all its manufacturing in China).

Exciting times indeed.

I think fabs are a business where capital rules vs labor cost. GlobalFoundies built a fab in New York, but got megabucks in aid to do so.

GlobalFoundries is getting massive incentives to expand in New York State. The initial Saratoga Springs is just the first fab Cuomo has built for them. Currently, they're building another fab in Utica that's intended to rehabilitate it after its Rust Belt woes.

Similarly, Tesla/Solar City received a huge number of economic incentives to build a factory in Buffalo.

Naturally, since this is NYS there's also been a fair bit of corruption:

[1] http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Kaloyeros-in-fight-t...

I fully expect the state government to throw a bunch of incentives at Amazon as well for HQ2- there's a push in Rochester for someone to take over all of the Kodak/Xerox buildings after those two companies royally messed up.

GloFo is owned by a middle eastern oil fund btw.

No international company will put a fab in china unless the equipment is 10 years out of date. Semi conducter production isn’t labor intensive anyways.

False. GF has a JV to build a 300mm 22nm FD-SOI line in China https://www.globalfoundries.com/news-events/press-releases/g...

22 nm is about 10 years old.

Not the same thing. 22 FD-SOI is current gen for FD-SOI.

TSMC is also building a 16nm line https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332704

While it is true that cutting edge lines are going to stay in established facilities with established R&D teams there is nothing stopping China from getting the tech. Everything is for sale. What China is missing is the expert workforce that can actually bring up a line for a next gen process themselves, which takes time to build, not just money.

There are two things china can’t buy because no country will sell it to them: a. Advanced semi conductor tech, b. Modern Jet turbine tech. Those two things China has to (and is) develop themselves. They definitely aren’t there yet, which is why they import those things in spades (most semiconductors are imported, and even china’s own jet fighters are mostly reliant on saturns). They will probably get there in the future.

If they poach the employees from the companies building this stuff, wouldn't it be possible for them to build it? Also, I am not much knowledgeable about jet engines but why can't they just reverse engineer jet turbine tech.

No one person knows how to do it all, it really is a closely guarded secret. For jet turbines, the metallurgy is key. For semi conductors, there are materials but really it is just many many details distributed throughout the entire organization. Crazy when you think about it.

But there are other things: just look what the C919 is importing: besides turbines, the avionics are imported as well. Complex software...

Don’t GF have a 12nm FD SOI process?

Projecting first customer tape outs in 1H 2019 (https://www.globalfoundries.com/news-events/press-releases/g...) as of a year ago - so still in early development.

I see it as more confirmation that Moore's Law is probably dead for real this time. By many measures Intel has enjoyed a 2 - 5 year lead over the competition in terms of circuit design and they have lost that lead. What that says to me is that over the last 2 - 5 years everything they have tried in order to push past this node has not resulted in useful advances. And if they can't push this down the beach can anyone else?

Intel has known their Dennard Scaling was petering out for a while now.

I think Intel is more concerned with the loss of their instruction set architecture "monpoly." Despite their massive R&D investments, they aren't expecting process scaling to be the big win for much longer.

I think it depends what you mean by moor's law, since everyone seems have a different view on it. If we are still talking about transistor density then it is not dead yet. Intel as shown the improvement from 14nm and 10nm is roughly in line. But i am pretty certain the next one wont fit the graph line any more. But if we are taking about the economics of transistor where it is getting cheaper 40-50% cheaper every two years then that has gone since 14nm.

Intel is delayed on their next-gen node and so that has given the others time to get Intel's last-gen node working but that in no way indicates that they will surpass Intel.

Yeah. It's hard to tell how much we are seeing these reviews because people want to see Intel get passed vs. because Intel is actually getting passed.

Are there any rest that chips released, actual chips, where the different foundries can say "look here's 1kb of sram on an actual chip, with this basic adder circuit, and this is how much area it takes and this is how much energy it consumes on our latest process"?

Actual performance doesn't always match the spec sheet, it's hard to get a true comparison unless you've got circuits from each foundry.

I studied all this stuff in university during the dark ages, and still have to do a double take whenever I see “nm” measurements. These things are atomic scale, and we use them all day long as if nothing happened.

Yeah I can remember how amazing 1 micron widths were. getting to 100th of that is a miracle.

Slightly off topic but, how do they create the lithography masks with such tiny and precise features?

Cut with lasers or electron beams as far as I know, and the masks are bigger by some multiple. Also have really weird patterns, since they have to correct for how the light-waves interact due to the small size.

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