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Comment by rshm | Hacker News Reader

Is DUV inherently 5nm a 20% yield class or it's matter of process improvement that China is struggling compared to taiwan or Intel ?

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For multi-patterning DUV, each patterning/etching step accumulates defect risk. Actually now that I'm reading about it, 20% is the better end of the spectrum. I don't think technology could possibly improve it much beyond that.

I believe the theoretical maximum yield for multi-patterning DUV at 5nm and 7nm is 30-40%

It's not economically sustainable/viable long term. China is only doing it because they've been forced to by the trade war Trump started against them in his first term (Biden didn't really back down either and now Trump 2 tried to ramp it up even higher). China is okay with such low yields because its supposed to be a temporary solution until they achieve domestic EUV tech.

Surely yield is very much a function of the size of the device in question and its tolerance for defects. I don’t think it makes sense for a technology to have a theoretical maximum yield that’s a constant number unless it somehow destroys entire wafers with highish probability.

You can normalise by surface area, which makes defects rate comparable across processes. At least to a first order approximation, keeping all other parameters constant, bigger chips are more likely to have a defect because they have larger surface areas.

If a process has a defect rate of x, the probability of a die having a defect is A*x. The limit is then the defect rate for a die with the surface area of a transistor, you cannot really get any better than this. But that’s not very useful if you want to extrapolate what the defect rate would be on an improved or cheaper process.

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