Wednesday, September 29th 2021

Fabricating the Fabs: ASML Vision Document Predicts 300 Billion-Transistor Logic by 2030

"Moore's Law is alive and well," says ASML, in its vision document addressing investors. The company manufactures the machines that perform the actual task of silicon lithography—turning silicon discs into wafers of logic or storage chips. It highlighted the various technologies making progress, which will help its semiconductor-fabrication customers, such as TSMC and their hundreds of clients, sustain Moore's Law all the way through this decade. The company predicts SoCs with as many as 300 billion transistors by 2030. To achieve this, the company is innovating in two distinct directions—at the chip-level, to increase transistor density per chip to over 50 billion transistors; and at the system level, through packaging technology innovations, to reach that ultimate transistor count.

According to ASML's roadmap, at the turn of the decade, its technology enables 5 nm-class in production, and is at the cusp of a major breakthrough, nanosheet-FETs. which pave the way for 3 nm and 2 nm nodes, backed by EUV lithography. The journey from 2 nm to 1.5 nm will require another breakthrough, forked-nanosheets, and from 1.5 nm to 1 nm yet another breakthrough, CFET. Sub-1 nm fabrication will be possible toward the turn of this decade, thanks to 2D atomic channel technology, which is how chip-designers will be able to cram over 50 billion transistors per chip, and build MCM systems with over 300 billion transistors. The presentation predicts that besides 3D packaging, stacked silicon will also play a role, with multiple stacked logic layers, heterogenous chips with logic, storage, and I/O layers, stacked DRAM (up from single-digit layers to double-digits; and for NAND flash to grow from the current 176-layer, to nearly 500-layer by 2030.
The complete slide-deck follows.
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9 Comments on Fabricating the Fabs: ASML Vision Document Predicts 300 Billion-Transistor Logic by 2030

#1
Rithsom
Sooner or later they're going to hit that wall preventing them from making transistors any smaller. It's not like they can shrink silicon atoms...

Though, to be honest, I'm still surprised that the fab companies are able to make transistors as small as they are today.
Posted on Reply
#2
Richards
Faster transistors are more important than density... no use packing 300 billion slow transistors abd being beaten by 120 billion fast ones
Posted on Reply
#3
Wirko
300 billion transistors, faster or not, on 300 mm or 700 mm wafers, in architectures with 5 or 11 levels of cache* can still be described as more of the same. Should I be glad or should I be sad?

*Because everything between CPU registers execution units and persistent storage is cache.
Posted on Reply
#5
Fatalfury
So 1nm comes only in the year 2030?
Generally speaking thats seems little slower compared to the speeds TSMC and Samsung is moving
since we are in 5nm in 2021, possibly 4nm in 2022,3nm in 2023.
Posted on Reply
#6
not_my_real_name
IMO this is already a noticeable slowdown.
The company predicts SoCs with as many as 300 billion transistors by 2030.
300 billion for SoICs and 50 billion for ICs (or SoCs), as you mentioned below.
Posted on Reply
#7
Minus Infinity
Seems a very primitive way to still be thinking about performance. There has to be a paradigm shift, they will not be able to dissipate heat quick enough for a start. If by 2030 we aren't embracing radically new approaches to chip design I'd be very surprised.
Posted on Reply
#8
Wirko
Cerebras is already at 1.2 trillion transistors on ... well, something that I think still fits the definition of a chip.
Posted on Reply
#9
Mister300
And this will not be affordable for the common man. Think yields are poor now just wait.
Posted on Reply
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