Big Trouble at 3nm

3 nanometers equals about 6 silicon atoms in a crystal lattice!

Nothing about 3nm is 3nm.

The actual gate pitch of a 7nm process is 54nm, and the interconnect pitch is 40nm. Though the name is "7nm", it's far from it.

Good question. That's a strange graph in general. I think most items have little to do with the node choice.

From the article:

> The $1.5 billion figure involves a complex GPU at Nvidia

I think the graph shows how much it costs a company in total to design a chip at different nodes. In general, chip vendors add more functionality with each generation. That seems to be what the graph shows.

The article says the graph comes from International Business Strategies. Their web page tells me to install Flash, which was enough to prevent me looking further:

http://www.ibs-inc.net/#!reports

Also, someone should tell them that IBS stands for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

That probably reflects the higher complexity of ICs at cutting edge nodes - being that newer node are an enabler for denser ICs.

Not clear, but I suspect it means newer, better modelling and synthesis.

There isn’t that kind of increase at all, it’s pure BS. Costs for semiconductor design don’t scale that way. Even the costs for semiconductor manufacture aren’t like that.

Not necessarily. Parallelization has allowed better performance from chips. Adding more cores has allowed better throughput but the benefits are seen more on the application side. They could make the chips bugger, but the problem with expanding outward is the routes connecting the transistors become too long and suffer increased time delay due the increased resistance of the long line. Without being able to make chips larger the only way to get better physical performance is to increase density.

It's not just decreasing spacing.

It's decreasing wire resistance and gate capacitance. That's what makes the most difference. It is also about making things cheaper, because your costs are constant for a wafer, but the use is measured by gate count.

That said, things are not that simple for a long time already.

Well we could switch everything to balanced ternary (which has a higher radix economy not just than binary, but also than unsigned ternary. Something most people talking about ternary neglect to mention - because the traditional formula for calculating radix economy isn't generalized.), but that comes with a heap of other (tractable!) problems...