Is TSMC the only who is close to doing this?
What about Samsung or Intel? Or research labs that do smaller runs?
What about Samsung or Intel? Or research labs that do smaller runs?
On paper I don't think it's risky to say everyone is looking at GAAFETs and MBCFETs, they're the evolution of finFETs (okay, we have the fin, what about more than one fin? Okay, how about the channel is surrounded by the gate (Gate-All-Around)?) How far along is everyone to making them commercially available with good yields, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I think the surprising thing to me was TSMC has thus far (as of like a month ago) been of the mind "nah, finFETs are fine". But keep in mind, that was for their 3nm node, which this isn't.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16041/where-are-my-gaafets-ts...
TSMC has always had a conservative culture. They dont aim at x% of improvement per process node like Intel. GAA for 3nm has long been known to be not ready for 2022. They actually mentioned this in 2019. But it was only confirmed later at a conference that Anandtech picked it up. Mainstream media being an echo chamber decide to copy each other and the news spread like wild fire.
So it was only logical to push those improvements to 2nm.
I'm aware of how TSMC felt about the prospects of GAA at 3nm, and their view of Samsung's yield prospects (i.e. not great).
Sure, it's logical to push GAA to the next node if you can, but part of TSMCs style is that they didn't even confirm that they were moving past fins until earlier this year.
They don't even have twitter! (Or do they and I've been too stupid to find it? Official I mean.)
There was a goal. The goal became PR. Someone in management began to believe the PR, and turned it into a promise, predicated on 'and then a miracle occurs' (the engineers figure out how to do some things that haven't been done before). The engineers keep trying to explain how nobody has done this before because you can't. To do so involves violating the laws of physics or Information Theory. Anyone who cracks this problem deserves a Nobel nomination, so that probably isn't us.
Middle management is stuck in the middle because someone has made promises we can't keep, and they either make it worse or help cover it up by playing for time.
You either solve a different problem that has similar behavior (or at least, until researchers discover Meltdown), or you slowly reset expectations until people are chronically grumpy but nobody is yelling.
It's probably fairly commonplace.