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Comment by mappu | Hacker News Reader

Layman POV:

- TSMC are the only company currently shipping real products at 7nm, and 5nm is a full generation ahead beyond that - nobody else is anywhere close to 5nm.

- Samsung will have a 7nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to TSMC's current 7nm (data point: the Galaxy S10 ships with either the Exynos 9820 on Samsung's "8nm" (enhanced/rebranded 10nm) process, or the broadly-similar-performance-with-better-power-efficiency Snapdragon 855 on TSMC 7nm)

- Intel will have a 10nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to TSMC's current 7nm. They are still shipping 14nm as their leading node.

- Global Foundries have stopped further investment beyond 14nm.

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>- Intel will have a 10nm later this year that is broadly equivalent to TSMC's current 7nm. They are still shipping 14nm as their leading node.

Just to add, by that time TSMC will have an improved 7nm based on EUV.

I wonder what happens after TSMC 3nm, that is roughly 2022 / 2023. I am pretty sure we can do 2nm, but without another market expansion to further spread the cost of unit, I wonder who will be able to afford these leading nodes. With every generation being much more expensive than previous gen. Smartphone unit shipment are not growing, in fact leading node Mobile SoC are likely shrinking on a YoY basis due to slower replacement cycle.

We surely haven't reach the technical limit of SemiConductors, but it looks to me we reach the Market / Economical Limit.

Equipment sales were actually going down for close to 3 years now. We are up for long winter in the industry.

7nm is here to stay. 5nm is possible it is just an optimisation of 7nm SAQP and can be done without radical increase of maskset costs.

After that, we are going down the rabbit hole of EUV litho.

A poorly held secret in the industry is that fabs want to use EUV to not to make <7nm, but to make economical <40nm litho with single exposure.

The biggest increase in cost after 40nm were due to increased numbers of exposures and more non-device and metal layers.

Cheap 20nm, single exposure planar litho will be a very commercially attractive process for a lot of things.

>Equipment sales were actually going down for close to 3 years now. We are up for long winter in the industry.

I heard some say this, Would it really be "Winter" though? I guess from equipment manufacture perspective that is yes. From the industry as whole I guess it is just longer cycle, more cost reduction from technology stand points.

>A poorly held secret in the industry is that fabs want to use EUV to not to make <7nm, but to make economical <40nm litho with single exposure.

I guess that is still many years out? Considering all the ASML EUV unit are fully booked till 2021, and with increasing use of EUV from Intel I guess that is likely to continue till 2023 / 2024.

It would be quite some time before we can make super cheap 20nm components.

> I heard some say this, Would it really be "Winter" though?

Yes, serious economists hired by fab companies almost all think so. See, fab ecosystem can't create demand by itself, it relies on clients selling new fancy things, and there are no new fancy things on the horizon, and even "megaclients" are scaling down new orders.

The one overt ways fabs can stimulate consumption is by inventing ground breaking new concepts, and then giving them away... As was with chip cameras (smartphones, optical mouses) RF integration (think of every SoC with wireless today,) MEMS, power on silicon...

Even on that from, there is little new things coming.

> I guess that is still many years out? Considering all the ASML EUV unit are fully booked till 2021, and with increasing use of EUV from Intel I guess that is likely to continue till 2023 / 2024.

1 single exposure on planar EUV process can replace 10+ multiple patterning exposures. So, even with a dramatically lower throughput, it can slash process times, and shoot up yields.

I thought we were reaching some physical limit at 5nm, (Only one electron could pass through the gate?)

> Smartphone unit shipment are not growing

While smart cars are still nowhere near the horizon, they already contain all kinds of chips and 5G is just being laid out, so ... talk about mobile ;)

100M Car Sold every year and majority of them ( Until AV Comes ) don't require any more Silicon than a Smartphone. The 5G hype will hopefully move the market to slightly faster replacement cycle, although I doubt it will happen.

The only possible lift for the market is the SEA and India make major leaps and bounds in their economical growth. But that is unlikely to happen either.

are you aware that motor control, and I don't even want to know what else, is already equipped with chips? No, no you don't.

> Intel will have a 10nm later this year

Intel hopes to have a 10nm later this year

At current progress, Intel will have a 10nm ready for a Q4 2022 release, excluding processors that would rather melt through the mainboard than run demanding tasks (or doubling as space heater).

The thing is, by 2022 they will likely have 7nm which is a totally separate team and effort and it's much more likely to succeed thanks to EUV. I have even seen late 2021 estimates for that and it's not entirely impossible they can crunch off a few months off arriving to a point where 10nm will have 2020 for it and that's it. An effort that took more than seven years and it's all going to waste.

You could still cast doubt on that, even if it were a completely separate team though.

Without knowing the causes for why Intel are failing to deliver 10nm we can't say if it's an Intel problem, or a 10nm team problem.

And even then, would they not be building on the 10nm process to develop the 7nm process to some extent? Otherwise you're reinventing the wheel twice, and may as well jump straight to 5/3/2nm processes.

There have been a bunch of rumors leaking out of Intel on the reasons. The biggest one was apparently that the Contact Over Active Gate just didn't work. That was used extensively in the GPU section of the die but not the CPU part which is why the 10nm chips released had working CPUs but no graphics. They've cut that feature from the process for the new version of 10nm which should help.

The other big rumored problem they were having was with cobalt interconnects and I have no idea if they've made it work or abandoned it or what.

There's clearly more to it because it was only the GPU part that didn't work they would've (gladly!) released the server parts.

Of course we don't know for sure, but there's a little precedent.

While the Pentium 4 team was churning out ever more power-hungry space heaters, a separate team came up with Pentium M. It became the basis for the Core architecture that gave Intel a 10-year monopoly.

If anyone knows that having separate teams reinvent their own wheels can have a massive payoff, it's Intel.

That was amazing to watch. Remember when Intel predicted in 2000 that by 2011 they will have 10GHz chips? https://web.archive.org/web/20000819011344/http://www.zdnet....

Also, it's funny how the space heating monsters of yesteryear reached 115W and we are still making fun of that today when desktop CPUs can be above 200W https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th... and workstation CPUs will go above double that https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-threadripper-...

Admittedly, under normal circumstances most people will never have their CPU consuming more than 65W and that's awesome.

> And even then, would they not be building on the 10nm process to develop the 7nm process to some extent?

No, they are very different processes.

Who would have an advantage building a 5nm processor. Intel, or some random company that doesn't build processors?

There is institutional knowledge, built up over every new generation. Now 7nm could be different to 10nm, but they've learnt transferable knowledge from that effort, even if its just how not to do it.

> Global Foundries have stopped further investment beyond 14nm.

That's an interesting approach since they'll be able to refine the 14nm step itself much like Intel has been doing for some time. That leaves them in a pretty good position as the finer nodes (10nm, 7nm etc.) will be inherently limited for a long time due to their unfavorable NRE costs, use will be possible only for the highest-profile stuff with the broadest feasible market.

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