The race between Intel, Samsung, and TSMC to ship the first 2 nm chip

arstechnica.com

34 points·caust1c··11 comments

Samsung might be first, but do they have the yield and the scale?

Is anything about the chip actually 2nm? I thought it was all just a marketing number these days.

I love the fast progress! How many years until we start measuring chip feature sizes in picometers? When can I get a 500pm chip?

Modern node names are more marketing labels than a description of any real feature size of the underlying process. We can "have" 500pm anytime we want by simply naming a node appropriately. There aren't any serious roadmaps out to the picoscale, but people have proposed a future Angstrom roadmap beyond 1.4nm. 500pm would be A5, or sometime in the late 2030s.

As an aside, 500pm is just about enough to fit 2 whole silicon atoms, so it's hard to imagine it ever being a real description of a feature size.

Is 2nm only 4 silicon atoms? Or what is the actual feature size?

A silicon atom is about 0.2-0.3 nm.

"3nm" process has a metal pitch of about 24nm.

So at that point we’re basically stuck? Maybe new materials will help? Stacking?

If you stack transistors, the process node will indeed go smaller than a single atom, even a hydrogen atom.

Thank you that gives me hope for the future.

Just make some smaller silicon

Like, duh.

Scientists just be overcomplicating things.

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