Can We Break the 2nm Barrier in Silicon Fabrication? | Hacker News Reader

Can We Break the 2nm Barrier in Silicon Fabrication?

jscitech.ir

28 pointssfmth28 comments

So we have options and this is all ten years out before we actually hit this wall.

However, according to this, our current solutions to the issues faced at sub-20nm lithography were developed by IBM in the 90's. So that is the question.

What technique exists today that will be used for the next 30 years?

I am envisioning a true death of "Moore's Law" but we will have time before we encounter the limits of Amdahl's law[0] in the use of chiplets and other dedicated hardware. Apple has their T2 and security enclaves, NVIDIA has tensor cores and other fixed function silicon, AMD is proving chiplets with seperate compute dies and I/O dies works well, Intel is now working on the same but for GPU's[1] ontop of compute and I/O, and the new Playstation 5 has a dedicated ARM CPU for the SSD.

Having dedicated silicon for specific tasks (such as encryption, ray-tracing, storage, networking, and so on), or even an FPGA of some sort will likely be the future.

It will be like the 90's again with northbridge and southbridge chips and 5 or 6 expansion cards.

But I am excited to see the solutions that will drive computers for the next 30 years.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law?wprov=sfla1

[1]:https://www.anandtech.com/show/16021/intel-moving-to-chiplet...

Ahh, fondly remember the days when I had to get a separate fpu for my Motorola 68lc040

Samsung also just announced memory/ram with processing Ai cores to speed read write access https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...

original: https://semiengineering.com/breaking-the-2nm-barrier/

> Seyed Farhad Modaresi > Editor-in-Chief and the Owner

> High school diploma

Sounds like a credible scientific journal

Do you have any arguments against the article itself?

No, I don’t understand the subject in depth to have arguments against it. When I don’t understand a subject in depth, I look for the source credibility to decide if it’s read worthy before going down the rabbit hole of making sense out of it.

It's alright to not read it but let the criticism to someone who knows if there is something wrong. Highschoolers can be extremely smart even before getting their diploma and formal education is not necessarily a good indicator of knowledge.

Actually - when you see someone with no degree in an area speaking with this level of authority you should be skeptical. High schoolers are known for copy paste work as well. I've interviewed some for internships and some of them have lots of great "papers", but when you interview them you realize they don't even actually have any knowledge AT ALL of even ultra fundamental things (in my field).

I'm reminded of Nikola's director of hydrogen tech - guy had no degree in anything close to hydrogen and had worked doing driveways. I am skeptical in those cases, as I am here!

So I'd seriously looking at something like journalistic or academic fraud or plagiarism with this guys background.

I'm not saying blindly accept whatever. If you see plagiarism or fraud, or if the article is wrong, say it! But don't just claim that if the guy has highschool diploma, it must be wrong - come with arguments, or let someone else come with them.

Non-experts usually have much larger unknown unknowns than experts, and much smaller knowns than experts.

The apriori reason for not trusting a non-expert's argument, when you yourself are not an expert, is that your unknown unknowns are also large, so you can't find all mistakes in the argument.

His public profiles say he's working on a degree right now. Not good enough for you though, probably.

The article is a verbatim copy of https://semiengineering.com/breaking-the-2nm-barrier/ written by an executive editor for manufacturing at Semiconductor Engineering.

Alright I should probably change that, I'm studying electronics engineering for a bachelor's degree

Did you get permission from SemiEngineering to reprint their article in full on your site?

(regardless of the answer, you should update the link to point to the original source, per site guidelines)

I had provided a link, but I checked the website and found that I cannot copy their work for uses other than personal use. So the post is unpublished now. Thanks for the reminder.

If you can still edit the post, can you please change the link to the original?

The post is hidden now. and I couldn't change the link, i posted a new submission with the original link

I'm working on bringing peer-reviewd content, but posts with the News & Views tag are not scientific articles as mentioned

the post is unpublished and hacker news submission is hidden now

Best to ask is it doable in practice?

E-beam lithography can get to real 1nm in practice quite easily, but you can spend a week on a CPU sized IC for a single exposure.

I would rather we figure out how to manufacture 30nm at 1/100 the capital cost that it does now.

You can't really democratize compute, if there is a global oligopoly on manufacturing processor chips.

raspi has already come close enough with the raspi zero, the bottleneck is not hardware price/availability but rather people's ability to write efficient programs and solve human problems

I wonder if any of those higher temperature (relatively) super conductors that were at the top of the page recently will be of value here?

Many of these new alternative technologies improve on some parameters (switching speeds or thermal efficiency), but in terms of miniaturization (which also leads to better switching speeds and thermal efficiency) the established tech (silicon) will rule for quite a while, simply because of the gigantic head start it has. At the end, none of these technologies really provide for a way to have things smaller than an atom, and silicon tech is already approaching the scale of tens of atoms. It would take a while to get other tech to that regime.

atomically precise manufacturing with diamondoid mechanosynthesis or something maybe? xprize elon or bill gates fund this plz https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266583736_A_Minimal...

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