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IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips
- le_meta 11y ago(When measured in terms of IBM hype quotients.)
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoWow, 7 nanometer is incredible! I wonder how small they can get silicon / silicon-germanium based chips before we have to resort to other techniques such as light processors (since light can be closer and even cross each other without issue). 10 nanometers that they're introducing next year is also incredible, at least to me since I'm not a hardware engineer and can't imagine how difficult manufacturing these are.
- Frenchgeek 11y agoThey use germanium.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoIt's silicon-germanium (so still has silicon in it). I'm curious what comes after :)
- Frenchgeek 11y agoThe last time I checked, diamond looked promising.
- jpmattia 11y agoDoubtful: You can't really dope it n-type. Diamond has the interesting property of having it's conduction band above vacuum level, so that free electrons would (in principle) fall out of the material. (Surface physics gets in the way of that.) It's the reason that diamond is used for cold-cathode emitters btw.
- QuantumRoar 11y agoIII-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide have a high mobility and are probably tested right now in Research labs around the world for CMOS-transistors (it is already in use for something like solar panels). But there's always the problem of how to scale these things as well as silicon based manufacturing. Further out is still some stuff like graphene or carbon nanotubes. Of course, the structure of the transistor itself might change, which could enable further downscaling. There's already been a switch from planar to Silicon-on-Insulator (e.g. GlobalFoundries, TSMC, Samsung(?)) and Intel has the TriGate (everybody else calls it FinFet). One day we might see the natural evolution to the gate-all-around FET, which would be something akin to a silicon nanowire (note: planar has the gate on top, FinFET has gate on top, left, and right of the channel). However, there are huge roadblocks in manufacturing to solve. And this could really be an issue. We might very well be able to build at the 5nm node. But if we can't build them fast and cheap enough, noone's going to do it. Manufacturers are already triple-patterning and doing all kinds of voodoo just to keep up with Moore's law. Good old silicon might actually stay a central part for a much, much longer time.
- joshuapants 11y agoCould the vacuum channel transistor[1] also be a contender? [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-...
- QuantumRoar 11y agoThere's no one way forward. A lot of things might happen and it will only be decided once a company actually ships a new and viable technology. Remember what Intel did with the FinFETs. It was the same discussion then (What could the next thing be? III-V, SOI, blabla?). At one point, Intel simply came on stage, surprised us with FinFETs and everybody was like: "I guess it's FinFET, then." The idea of FinFETs is actually from the 90s or so. The sole reason why noone did it before is because noone could actually build them at scale (AFAIK, Intel is still the only company that ships FinFETs). Keep in mind that manufacturing is very hard. It is very unlikely that there will be more than incremental steps. Just changing the channel material is already quite the task. Also, don't believe any "This is the next transistor!" stuff. You can find these things a lot but they rarely mean more than some department trying to make a bit of publicity.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoGraphene looks promising (as it is for everything).
- nkassis 11y agoHehe, yeah I was just reading a magazine this morning talking about it's the next big material in cycling for everything from strengthening carbon fiber parts to conduct electricity to replace cables used for shifting/brakes to hearth rate monitoring clothing etc... Seems like the wonder material.
- valarauca1 11y agoCarbon sucks in chips. C has a 5.5eV band gap while Si has a 1.1 and Ge has a 0.67 Whats bandgap? The energy difference between a conductor/insulator in a semi-conductor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bandgap_in_semiconductor.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bandgap_in_semiconductor.... The only real reason to switch to carbon chips is noise reduction at the 4nm node (if we ever go that far, we're getting into Long X-Rays at that point for lithography). Also 4nm node will only be ~16-18 carbon atoms wide.
- pjc50 11y agoGraphene is a massive pain to manufacture. For example, I don't think you can sputter it on to wafers.
- creshal 11y agoProcess names have little to do with actual feature sizes any more. I think 130nm was the last where the name had any correlation to the actual physical dimensions. (Ex.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45_nanometer#Example:_Intel.27s_45.C2.A0nm_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45_nanometer#Example:_Intel.27... )
- prewett 11y agoI could be wrong, but I think optical processors would have serious diffraction problems with a 7 nm feature size, since the wavelength of blue light is somewhere around 300 nm. As far as fabrication, one problem is that obviously you aren't using visible light to etch features on your wafers. The x-rays must be fun to work with... Not to mention, your photoresist would have to resist x-rays. Getting x-ray-resisting photoresist on and off your wafer must be tricky. Since 7 nm is about the size of several atoms, your wafer probably needs to be almost perfectly pure, which can't be easy, either.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoHmm yeah I have no idea, I mostly read this which really intrigued me but I don't really understand all of the technology and science behind it http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/20100727comp_sm.htm http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/2010072... I had always gotten the impression that even if it they couldn't get as small the impact of less heat and the ability to cross beams could allow them to be denser. But like I said I don't really know what I'm talking about :)
- pjc50 11y agoYou can't cross light beams at 7nm, if you had a "crossroads" structure" it would simply diffract round the corner and exit at all three other points.
- pjc50 11y agoIt's not xrays, it's "extreme ultraviolet" (EUV), plus diffraction-based multiple patterning. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/160509-seeing-double-tsmc-adopts-new-lithography-technique-to-push-moores-law-to-20nm http://www.extremetech.com/computing/160509-seeing-double-ts... (tldr: 193nm light works down to 28nm lambda; progress requires moving further into UV and/or use immersing in liquid with different refractive index)
- thomasstephn 11y agoThis should answer your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtI5wRyHpTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtI5wRyHpTg
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoInteresting, thanks!
- akurilin 11y agoReally great video.
- jtchang 11y agoNo mention of Intel anywhere in the article and how far along they are. Also 7nm blows my mind. I mean current CPUs already blow my mind with how tiny the transistors are getting. And specially stabilized buildings? "NOBODY MOVE! WE'RE ETCHING!"
- JoachimS 11y agoActually Intel was mentioned and its struggle with the 14 mm node.
- Frenchgeek 11y agoGiven the way we're going, I wonder how soon it will be cheaper and easier to build a cpu plant in orbit...
- JoachimS 11y agoOne covered in lead to protect the lito from high energy particles. This might be the time when pushing an asteroid into one of the Lagrange points and hollowed out would be useful. Go SF dreams, go! (Where is Musk when we need him?)
- Gravityloss 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility
- RoboTeddy 11y agoGreat talk that describes how modern (as of 2011) computer chips are manufactured: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
- signa11 11y agoexcellent talk. here is another SA article 'the first nano-chips' : http://community.nsee.us/courses/376-0_nanomaterials_sp04/nanochips_sci_american_2004.pdf http://community.nsee.us/courses/376-0_nanomaterials_sp04/na...
- rndn 11y agoThis EEVBlog episode on silicon chips is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0WEx0Gwk1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0WEx0Gwk1E
- thoughtsimple 11y agoThanks for this. Great presentation. I learned a lot.
- santaclaus 11y agoReturn of the PowerPC Mac?
- ianlevesque 11y agoHa, not likely. But because IBM and GF will manufacture for 3rd parties there's at least hope for AMD now if they get a better design.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoAlso research devices like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueNorth
- tracker1 11y agoI don't think that AMDs designs are particularly bad... an FX-8350 can go toe to toe with a higher end i5. Of course that's without the power savings of a newer process. I do hope that AMD comes up with something with a single-core performance competitive to an i7 with a power envelope in the ballpark.
- JoachimS 11y agoVery interesting. Good to see that the article points out that going from working transistors to commercial viable industrial process is also a big challenge. There are a lot of technologies and industry players that need to solve big problems before the node can start deliver. But that is what ITRS is for. Also, interesting to see how things like e-beam litography is pushed once again at least a node into the future. We (as in they) are still able to tune and optimize on the same infrastructure.
- warrenmiller 11y agoDid someone say ASIC?
- LoSboccacc 11y agoStill in research phase, from a company known for having 10% yields last time they innovated in the processor space Also hasn't Ibm just sold its division to global foundries? So are they double dipping as usual by licensing them new tech separately?
- BostonEnginerd 11y agoIBM just sold their division to GF -- but they're maintaining an R&D only operation. IBM, GF and Samsung are all part of the "Common Platform" to share R&D costs: http://www.commonplatform.com/ http://www.commonplatform.com/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- leni536 11y agoThe lattice spacing of silicon is ~0.54nm so 7nm is around 13 lattice spacing, it's really impressive. Slowly but surely we will hit atomic limits.
- eleitl 11y agoThe node size do not correspond to a given dimension of a structure anymore, it's computed property, from area of a given standard cell (e.g. SRAM cell).
- Dylan16807 11y agoThat's informative but doesn't disagree. It's not a 1:1 correspondence but it's a pretty close correlation to the actual widths of things.
- brilee 11y agosilicon is diamond cubic; 0.54 nm corresponds to 8/sqrt(3) radiuses worth. So the diameter of silicon is 0.23nm, and 7nm = ~30 silicon atoms across.
- rurban 11y agoYES! Kill Intel, PPC64 everywhere :) It will not happen, I know, but "Wouldn't it be nice" was always one of my favorite Beach Boys song (Pet Sounds!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofByti7A4uM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofByti7A4uM This is THE chance.
- vex 11y agoWhy exactly do you care so much?
- POWERfan 11y agoI can't speak for the GP, but POWER is a true RISC ISA, and many prefer it just for that reason.
- megablast 11y agoThere is no such thing as CISC or RISC anymore, what with micro ops.
- rurban 11y agoAs POWERfan said. The intel instruction set is an abomination. You couldn't even thing of something worse, however they managed. Intel needs competition. Everybody else died away. PPC64 is on the open, everybody can make one. This is better than the IBM PC revolution, where you could license it to produce competing parts. Also better than the various ARM chips. We need to break the HW barrier from the last years. CPU speed has stalled, only with new tech, as in the new Z series or Power8 chips Moore's law can be revived. And there are many more arguments to be excited.
- krylon 11y agoI'm upvoting you simply because I have had a pretty good day and because I love "Wouldn't It Be Nice". (In fact, Pet Sounds is an awesome album.) I a former job, I was working on an application that did a lot of computational geometry, and I remember reading one day that then-current POWER chips could do floating point multiplication and division in a single cycle (plus latency for pipelining, of course)...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- graycat 11y agoAs I recall, there is microelectronics fab work in Taiwan, South Korea, and, in the US, at IBM and Intel, at least. And maybe China and Russia are trying to get caught up in fabs. I wonder: What organization, really, is mostly responsible for the newer fabs? I mean, do each of Samsung, Intel, IBM, etc. do everything on their own? Or is there a main company, maybe Applied Materials, with some help from, say, some small company for UV sources, some optics from, maybe, Nikon, some mechanical pieces, etc., that does the real work for all the fabs? 7 nm -- what speed and power increases will that bring over 14 nm, 22 nm or whatever is being manufactured now, etc.? Long live Moore's law! It ain't over until the fat lady sings, and I don't hear any fat lady yet!
- joshuapants 11y ago> And maybe China and Russia are trying to get caught up in fabs. This is something that interests me. It must be terribly difficult to get up to speed on something like this, even with vigorous state funding. Are there any layman-readable sources on the topic?
- timelined 11y agoIBM/Intel/Samsung buy tools from various companies. By "tools", I really mean huge pieces of instrumentation that cost many (tens to hundreds) millions of dollars from other companies that are used for the various processing steps (deposition/growth of materials on wafers, patterning resists, etching, etc). The development of each of these tools is immensely difficult and challenging and making them talk to each other and designing manufacturing pipelines is another immense challenge. IBM/Intel/Samsung's job is to design chips (a immense challenge on its own), come up with a process to manufacture them, and then take each of these very complex tools, integrate them into a manufacturing pipeline (with QC), and manufacture the devices that they want.
- graycat 11y agoHow much is like turn key and how much is lots of one off, proprietary engineering and system integration? I was guessing that maybe for the fabs themselves, mostly there was some one company that delivered fabs. Or, why reinvent the wheel several times? Sure, for the chip design, say, by Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, IBM, that's a lot of design software, know how, etc. And, sure, QC has to be one heck of an Excedrin headache but with likely some long standing basic ideas for testability.
- awalton 11y agoLet's all realize that all of these research branches have been playing around with 10nm and 7nm chips for years now - the fact IBM cobbled together some working chip isn't surprising. Getting it to production is really the vastly more important part. This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from the lab to the FDA. The timing of this press release is entirely to boost investor confidence in IBM and GlobalFoundries given Intel's recent announcement of delays at the 10nm process node. edit: The Ars article is vastly better than the above link: http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/07/ibm-unveils-industrys-first-7nm-chip-moving-beyond-silicon/ http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/07/ibm-unveils-industr...
- vegabook 11y agoThe Ars article you refer to appears to be fairly bullish on IBM's process technology and in particular the extreme ultraviolet lithography which has been problematic elsewhere. IBM has deep history of fundamental research turning into real product: just look at magneto-resistive drive heads as one example. I am much less sceptical than you that this company which has proven over many decades that it can drive fundamental technology forwards is only doing this for reasons of bamboozling the competition / investors. Let's not forget that the chip in the Z series mainframes is the fastest commercial piece of silicon ever produced, and the high end Power8 chips handily outrun top-of-the-range 18-core Xeons on a number of benchmarks (though at worse power envelopes). (http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review/17 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9193/the-xeon-e78800-v3-review...).
- acomjean 11y agoI worked at IBM research for a bit (TJ Watson center Yorktown), when Gerstner was the CEO. They had PHDs chemists and physicists and mathematicians working on all sorts of things chip related. They had a mini fab in the building. I remember them testing building vibration levels. Turning technology into something that can me manufactured and sold was something was something definetely on the mind of research. IBM was spending 6 Billion a year on research and they were looking for more results out of it. They knew that an discovery/invention was good, but one that could be brought to market was better. The licensed a lot of their tech to the chip machine manufacturers if I remember correctly. Plus back in those days IBM had chip making facilities.
- icanhackit 11y agoTime to start working on the 7km chip. Fibre everywhere, content delivery servers everywhere, game servers out the wazoo so my crappy media streaming gadget or VR headset can remotely pull in the latest movies and games in 4K with minimal lag. You could outfit a few of the world's major cities for the cost of a new fab. Unfortunately this won't sell new consumer hardware on an regular basis.
- c0nnector 11y agoYou can build an entire new industry around it. Eveything as a service. Even hardware could become a service. You wouldn't have to actually own it, instead pay a monthly fee and you have access to produxt X. You get the latest models without any extras fees. The advantage of having a service is that the customer is hooked and it's harder to leave.
- puranjay 11y agoThese folks are trying something like that: https://saybyebuy.com/ https://saybyebuy.com/ As an idea, I feel it's wonderful. It would massively reduce wastage.
- rprospero 11y agoWhat scares me about proposals like this is that it's further stratification of society into two separate classes: those who actually own everything and those who must appease the owners. For example, I can put £40 in my sock drawer every month and, in eight months, I could buy a PS4 and use it for the rest of my life. I could then start save that £40 toward a different purchase. Alternately, I could go with the site you listed and pay £40 a month for the rest of my life just for that same PS4, never making headway. Now, you can point out that a PS4 is almost the definition of an unnecessary luxury and that I don't have to pay the £40 monthly rental fee, and you'd be right. I mostly went with that example because it was right on the front page and such a terrible deal. Still, in the world where I can own things, I can have the PS4 and the £40 a month, after a little over a half year of hardship, while the rental society won't let me have that. Similarly, I can buy a DVD and watch it forever, instead of shelling out for Netflix each month and hoping that they don't drop that title.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nickpsecurity 11y agoIt's neat but will only benefit the largest companies with the most elite developers. I've learned a lot about hardware development in past year for purposes of imagining clean-slate, subversion-resistant chips. The work it takes to get the 90nm and below chips working, especially inexpensively, is pretty mind boggling with many aspects still dark arts shrouded in trade secrets. Many firms stay at 130-180nm levels with quite a few still selling tech closer to a micron than a 28nm chip. Tools to overcome these challenges cost over a million a seat. So, seeing another process shrink doesn't excite me given we haven't tapped the potential of what we already have. Lots of technologies help: EDA; FPGA's: S-ASIC's; multi-project wafers; ASIC-proven I.P. And so on. Yet, even 350nm still isn't very accessible to most companies wanting to make a chip because the tools, I.P., and expertise are too expensive (or scarce sometimes). Yet, the benefits are real in so many use-cases (esp security). I'd like to see more companies dramatically bringing the costs down and eliminating other barriers to entry with affordable prices. Example of the problems and what kind of work we're looking at: http://eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110104-elephant/ http://eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110104-elephant/ Example direction to go in: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/megahard-corp-open-source-eda-as.html http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/megahard-corp-open... I think the best model, though, is to do what the EDA vendors did: invest money into smart people, including in academia, to solve the NP-hard problems of each tool phase with incremental improvements over time. I'm thinking a non-profit with continuous funding by the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Wall St firms, etc. A membership fee plus licensing tools at cost, which continues to go down, might do it. Start with simpler problems such as place-and-route and ASIC gate-level simulation to deliver fast, easy-to-use, low cost tools. Savings against EDA tools bring in more members and customers whose money can be invested in maintaining those tools plus funding hardest ones (esp high-level synthesis). Also, money goes into good logic libraries for affordable process nodes. Non-commercial use is free but I.P. must be shared with members. Setup right, this thing could fund the hard stuff with commercial activity and benefit from academic/FOSS style submissions. With right structure, it also won't go away due to an acquisition or someone running out of money. Open source projects don't die: they just become unmaintained, temporarily or permanently. Someone can pick up the ball later. Thoughts?
- nicholas73 11y agoThe press articles about this generally are misleading in that they use Silicon-Germanium as the catch phrase that's represents the breakthrough. Whereas in fact SiGe processes have been available for at least a decade. I know this because I developed chips for an IBM SiGe process a decade ago, and in college I did a research paper on semiconductor "superlattices" using an old textbook from our school library. It's not a new technology by any means. IBM's 7nm is a great accomplishment for sure, but we really don't know anything about how it was made from the articles. Essentially SiGe is a bit more conductive and can switch faster than normal Si chips, thanks to quantum tunneling.
- zxexz 11y agoI know nothing about silicon fab, but I can't help but wonder how they mitigate the effects of quantum tunneling at such a small scale?
- chriswilmer 11y agoI don't think the diameter of a DNA strand is 2.5nm...