Perspective!

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mawyatt
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Perspective!

Post by mawyatt »

Remember when I thought getting a single transistor for 10 cents was great. Today you can purchase a 64GB SD card or USB stick for $10. Assuming it takes ~3 transistors per byte then 64GB of memory has more than 64E9*3 or 192 billion transistors!! That's ~5 nano cents per transistor, or 1 cent will get you 192 million transistors :shock:

On the flip side of this is the chip development cost. The average development cost for a 7 nanometer chip today (like in your new Apple products) is a staggering $271M, yes over a quarter Billion US Dollars to develop 1 chip :shock: If you use a 14nm node then its $80M, and 28nm is $30M. I suspect these numbers are somewhat conservative as we developed a special chip 5 years ago in 28nm and the total cost was north of $40M and it was fully functional on 1st pass (took many months to verify tho)!

Crazy extremes indeed :roll:

Best,
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike

Smokedaddy
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Post by Smokedaddy »


Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Does that include the cost of developing and manufacturing the incredible machines and stepper lenses needed to mass produce things like that?

Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

Smokedaddy, your link says these will be made using "extreme ultraviolet photolithography". I wonder if I will live long enough to buy one of those lenses for a couple hundred dollars off eBay, as we can currently do with 1980s chip photolithography lenses :)

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

Unfortunately Intel is well behind TSMC in feature size. TSMC 7nm chips have been shipping for Apple products for some time now.

I don't know exactly what happened at Intel, but suspect they stumbled somewhere moving from 20~14nm where they were ahead of the pack.

IBM stumbled at 14nm also, they had selected a SOI FinFET, I was briefed on this back in 2012~13. These devices were absolutely stellar in performance, even better for analogish (RF, MW, MMW) use!! However soon found out that the heat capacity of the device was limited by the SOI interface at the bottom of the fins. SiO2 (and nitride) has a higher thermal conductivity that Si and the channel temperature is higher in SOI FinFETs than are Si FinFETs. Today advanced digital (which drives all advanced Si based technology) is limited by thermal constraints, and the amount of devices that can be packed into a given space has reached the thermal limit before the device limit if speed is a factor. So IBM couldn't put as many devices in the core of advanced higher speed digital chips as others, and basically abandoned the process for future use, and ended up licensing the Samsung 14nm process I believe.

The cost to develop a fab at 7nm I recall was something like ~$20B, and takes 3~4 years to build before it comes on-line! Couple that with $271M for a single chip design at 7nm ($80M for 14nm) and this indeed is a very crazy perspective.

Not only are the semiconductor physics at these advanced nodes mind blowing, the economics are too :shock:

BTW driver behind all this insanity is the cell phone with probably ~2B in service worldwide and a turnover period of a couple years.

Best,
Last edited by mawyatt on Wed Sep 25, 2019 12:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike

mawyatt
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Post by mawyatt »

Lou,

Wonder if any of those lenses employ meta-materials for creating negative index of refraction optics?

Best,
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike

mawyatt
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Joined: Thu Aug 22, 2013 6:54 pm
Location: Clearwater, Florida

Post by mawyatt »

Lou Jost wrote:Does that include the cost of developing and manufacturing the incredible machines and stepper lenses needed to mass produce things like that?
Lou,

If addressed to me regarding the cost to develop the 7nm chips, the answer is no! This is just the development cost of the 7nm chip to be fabricated on a 7nm process, but includes the multiple mask sets.

The ~$20B fab cost covers those machines and optics.

Best,
Research is like a treasure hunt, you don't know where to look or what you'll find!
~Mike

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