It’s mind boggling.
Oh, and beware of charlatans who want to sell you so-called artificial soulstones, they are awfully common in these halls. The gems are tools made by man to imitate the divine spark, but they can never rival or become the genuine article.
Weird anecdotes: the people working on EUV didn't believe in it at all. It was a big joke to them. But the roadmaps were showing it... not in 2019. The mirrors were being polished by hand. Robotic tools are more accurate, but the inaccuracies they produce are aligned, creating optically meaningful patterns. So instead they had two guys with PhDs in metallurgy polishing mirrors. The all important simulations of lensing systems were done with classical optics and a ton of FORTRAN. Certainly throwing in some phenomenology around effects that are ultimately quantum effects, but no out there quantum optics or anything of the sort. This was 2005 though. The weight of the lenses itself changed their optical properties enough that we would measure the stresses induced by their weight and the impact on optical properties so we could include that in the system end to end error budget.
Does this mean that Intel's "7nm" should be considered roughly equivalent with TSMC's "3nm"? And who's typically considered to have the lead on fab tech nowadays?
TSMC is definitely in the lead; maybe Samsung is #2.
AMD now divested into Global Foundries used to be on there as well, but they're pretty much dead in the water at this point. Both AMD and Nvidia use TSMC now actually. It's kind of funny that Intel is the only remaining foundry within the United States at this point except for maybe Texas Instruments, which lets be honest, doesn't really count.
Of course, but the margins are much better on cutting-edge nodes. Being second-to-market on a node doesn't save you much on capital costs, but you have to compete harder on wafer pricing. TSMC have about 5x the revenues of GF and the gap is widening.
No, not anymore for at least a decade, and this is the very reason GloFo bailed out on the "Arms Race." Extreme capex with uncertain payback times looked very scary to their investors.
TSMC 7FF will only break even next year.
I've no idea if that's true but assuming it is, then from next year it's pure profit and they are the big fish in a pond of 2 (or 3?) fish with no new fish in sight. People will be using this process for years and years to come. With so little competition at 7nm and the high barriers to entry (even over time) they can surely maintain their margins for much longer than at previous nodes. I'm not saying bailing wasn't the right decision for Global Foundries and the risk might be higher now, but so the rewards.
Granted I have no idea what their process node is, which they don't advertise anywhere presumably because people buying microcontrollers and DSPs do not really care about an arbitrary silicon feature size number. It's probably not cutting edge, but they're a big foundry regardless.
GlobalFoundaries is definitely not dead either. They even do 14nm which is hardly very outdated (and is probably the last practical node anyway).
https://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/content.do?id=18397
https://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/content.do?id=16678
ST has been boasting about their new STM32G series as being their first 90nm product, though I doubt it'll start a nm race in the microcontroller world...
[1]: https://www.renesas.com/jp/en/about/press-center/news/2018/n...
Correction, gigadevices are still at 55
The more general word would be "fab", which is any semiconductor manufacturing facility.
Samsung Austin is in Texas.
They failed hard at their 10nm process, and are still struggling to recover from that.
TSMC is the the indisputable leader on fab technology at the moment
Just because a bike has a few carbon fiber spokes doesn't mean it's the same as another bike with a few carbon fiber spokes. The rest matters too, not least of which the other spokes ;-) and there are probably differences between carbon fiber spokes too!
At least I thought DUV was still in use in combination with (not entirely replaced by) EUV.
Furthermore, it seems likely that the uppermost layers will never use EUV and that therefore a mix of EUV and DUV will always be used, indefinitely. This seems likely unless EUV surprisingly becomes much cheaper so that unifying on a single technology becomes worth it, or unless both EUV and DUV are replaced by something else entirely.
Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips
Marketing video that has a bunch of nonsense and a few interesting shots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL3TYXr52BY