Friday, June 4th 2021
TSMC 4nm Production Hit By... A Full Quarter Advance?
Here's something that has been sorely missing from tech news: good news. It seems that TSMC's development on the 4 nm manufacturing process is running better than anticipated by the company itself, which has prompted for a full quarter advancement for the test production on TSMC's next miniaturization level. Previously scheduled for test production starting on 4Q 2021, TSMC has announced that it has now moved test production to 3Q 2021.
This could mean an equivalent - or perhaps even better - reduction in volume production and time-to-market, but it's anyone's guess at this point. As notably difficult and onerous as semiconductor development is, problems are more likely to appear than not. 4 nm is expected to bring respectable improvements to the PPA equation for semiconductors over 5 nm - however, TSMC still hasn't disclosed expected gains.
Source:
TSMC
This could mean an equivalent - or perhaps even better - reduction in volume production and time-to-market, but it's anyone's guess at this point. As notably difficult and onerous as semiconductor development is, problems are more likely to appear than not. 4 nm is expected to bring respectable improvements to the PPA equation for semiconductors over 5 nm - however, TSMC still hasn't disclosed expected gains.
49 Comments on TSMC 4nm Production Hit By... A Full Quarter Advance?
7nm TSMC L3 transistor in Zen is 22 by 22nm.
Well that's an exaggeration but Samsung 3nm, if that's what you mean, will bring no more than a "45% reduction in area when compared with 7nm" - for a mix of logic and SRAM, and SRAM has scaled poorly on latest nodes, compared to logic. If only it was. Try to calculate the size of a transistor on the AMD's 6x6 mm cache die, which is said to be optimised for SRAM, and contains (almost) nothing else. I get 106 by 106 nm.
Turns out we won't turn into house plants in the future virtual revolution after all.
There are oceans of sand and not just in Africa.
dude is just reading bbcnews stuff, don't blame him.
svmi.com/product/silicon-ingot/
And watch this from 4:08:
Even if you wanted to make some really antiquated chip on huge process node, the sand itself most likely wouldn't be useful.
EDIT: tbh I genuinely baffled someone convinced you or convinced yourself they used special sand.
semiengineering.com/from-sand-to-wafers/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_method
The key part is that silicon itself is Si02 and only Si is what they need. Purifying and reshaping quartz into silicon ingots is a complicated process:
And then turning it into something useful isn't easy either:
And well we are running out of sand too:
And this is roughly (not industrially) how you get SiO2 out of sand:
It seems that construction industries can't use that "fine" sand and they are fighting over it, but it may be useful for chip manufacturing. Anyway, my point is that making sand into chips is very complicated and likely not all sand can be used for SiO2 production (or at least in economically viable way).
And btw sand mafia is no fun:
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/world-facing-global-sand-crisis-180964815/
www.cnbc.com/2021/03/05/sand-shortage-the-world-is-running-out-of-a-crucial-commodity.html
Its pretty recent news. Its a simple fact that like oil, we're using this natural resource faster than it comes back and exploitation difficulty increases over time or creates new problems, making it ever more expensive. Its more of the same and fits in the current frame of climate and sustainability.
'Don't blame him' - if you have some counter argument or factoid to provide perspective on that sentence, please do, otherwise you're just in denial and maybe you just learned something. All good either way...
I think its important to understand that all of these base resources are the ground work for all of the stuff we make out of it, and we make ever more stuff for more people. We synthesize a lot of materials, so it may look like something else, but the essence is that everything comes back to those basic natural resources every time. Logic dictates they all run out or lose purity. Even water - pure, clean water - is harder to come by every day, and purifying faster than we use it is a challenge.
Some games have predicted these shortages ;) I'll never forget this one - Dark Reign. 1997. Note the resource bar bottom right. And back on topic: did you know TSMC had water supply issues recently?