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
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49 Comments on TSMC 4nm Production Hit By... A Full Quarter Advance?

#26
medi01
Solid State Soul ( SSS )Lets assume we reach 1nm node, whats next after that ?
You realize it is purely marketing bazinga names, don't you?
7nm TSMC L3 transistor in Zen is 22 by 22nm.
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#27
mtcn77
medi01You realize it is purely marketing bazinga names, don't you?
7nm TSMC L3 transistor in Zen is 22 by 22nm.
But it is soon gonna be vertical in the near future.
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#28
Wirko
mtcn77But it is soon gonna be vertical in the near future.
This will be as efficient as parking your scooter toppled to use less space.

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.
medi01You realize it is purely marketing bazinga names, don't you?
7nm TSMC L3 transistor in Zen is 22 by 22nm.
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.
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#29
Thefumigator
Solid State Soul ( SSS )Lets assume we reach 1nm node, whats next after that ?
The first AMD Athlon (1999 I believe) was made in 0.25 μm, if that makes sense.
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#30
mtcn77
WirkoThis will be as efficient as parking your scooter toppled to use less space.

Well that's an exaggeration but Samsung 3nm, if that's what you mean,
Samsung has a vnand product which beats the market in every way. That is what I mean...
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#31
Legacy-ZA
mechtechThere's money in them silicon wafers......................
I always said, the one that figured out how to make sand into something useful, will never have financial issues again, plenty of it on the "earth" yet we always seem to have some sort of supply issue. :laugh:
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#32
mtcn77
Legacy-ZAI always said, the one that figured out how to make sand into something useful, will never have financial issues again, plenty of it on the "earth" yet we always seem to have some sort of supply issue. :laugh:
Yet, sources claim we are running out. They would like the sand to be "coarse" they say. Would you believe it...
Turns out we won't turn into house plants in the future virtual revolution after all.
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#33
DeathtoGnomes
Totally150 pm is pretty much the floor unless, some figures out how to fabricate chips using sub-atomic particles.
nanotubes will be the next evolution.
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#34
mtcn77
DeathtoGnomesnanotubes will be the next evolution.
Exactly, we will have none of this zero sum game any more. It is room temperature superconductors, or else in the future.
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#35
Totally
DeathtoGnomesnanotubes will be the next evolution.
Nanotubes can't be smaller than 1 atom in thickness and a gold atom is only 150 pm wide, and silicon is 111pm
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#36
Vayra86
Legacy-ZAI always said, the one that figured out how to make sand into something useful, will never have financial issues again, plenty of it on the "earth" yet we always seem to have some sort of supply issue. :laugh:
We're actually running out of sand. Lots of it needed for land creation in the increasing amount of ocean, construction, etc.
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#37
Legacy-ZA
Vayra86We're actually running out of sand. Lots of it needed for land creation in the increasing amount of ocean, construction, etc.
Running out? Stop drinking the cool aid that you are on. :roll: :laugh:





There are oceans of sand and not just in Africa.
Posted on Reply
#38
DeathtoGnomes
Vayra86We're actually running out of sand. Lots of it needed for land creation in the increasing amount of ocean, construction, etc.
I think you need a tad ( just a smidgen ) more specific here.
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#40
The red spirit
Legacy-ZAI always said, the one that figured out how to make sand into something useful, will never have financial issues again, plenty of it on the "earth" yet we always seem to have some sort of supply issue. :laugh:
It's not like they actually use just a sand. They use a way finer and much rarer version of it. You can read this:
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.
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#41
Totally
The red spiritIt's not like they actually use just a sand. They use a way finer and much rarer version of it. You can read this:
That's nonsense, finer, no (you aren't thinking here are you?) rare no, not necessarily. It's a refined material, get a bunch a sand purify it into silica sand, then melt it down with some doping agents mixed and form a crystal. not something they mine, dig up.

EDIT: tbh I genuinely baffled someone convinced you or convinced yourself they used special sand.
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#43
Wirko
TotallyThat's nonsense, finer, no (you aren't thinking here are you?) rare no, not necessarily. It's a refined material, get a bunch a sand purify it into silica sand, then melt it down with some doping agents mixed and form a crystal. not something they mine, dig up.

EDIT: tbh I genuinely baffled someone convinced you or convinced yourself they used special sand.
"Not just any sand, but silica sand, specially quarried for this purpose and having concentrations of quartz (silicon dioxide) as high as 95%."
semiengineering.com/from-sand-to-wafers/
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#44
DeathtoGnomes
they are using sand because mining sandstone and quartz silica is too expensive.
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#45
Legacy-ZA
KarymidoNwww.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand

dude is just reading bbcnews stuff, don't blame him.
I suppose if they should create a manufacturing facility in one of these places one day, they can give him the job shoveling clean around the building each day, lest nobody can get inside the building to work due to sheer amounts of the stuff being shifted on a daily basis, he will curse so much he would quit after the first week. I don't think he will ever say there is a shortage again. :laugh:
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#46
The red spirit
TotallyThat's nonsense, finer, no (you aren't thinking here are you?) rare no, not necessarily. It's a refined material, get a bunch a sand purify it into silica sand, then melt it down with some doping agents mixed and form a crystal. not something they mine, dig up.

EDIT: tbh I genuinely baffled someone convinced you or convinced yourself they used special sand.
Are you for real mate? Technically any rocky material can be called sand if it's under certain specified particle size. That sand can have literally any hard material, not necessarily a silicon. Silicon itself is silverish material, most sand is quite orange, so it likely has a lot of stuff that isn't silicon. And even if your sand has some silicon, then purifying isn't exactly cheap or easy. And by definition, you can't melt it into crystal. And if you actually read anything about it, then you would know that process is long and complicated:
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:
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#47
Prima.Vera
Totally150 pm is pretty much the floor unless, some figures out how to fabricate chips using sub-atomic particles.
The floor is 111Pm, which is the size of the Silicon atom. And I think they are already considering other materials to replace Silicon....
Posted on Reply
#48
Totally
Prima.VeraThe floor is 111Pm, which is the size of the Silicon atom. And I think they are already considering other materials to replace Silicon....
Floor is determined bit the largest elements being used not the smallest, conductors are still required and all currently used are larger than Si which already places very high on the table at 14, with only four other room temp being smaller and the rest gases.
Posted on Reply
#49
Vayra86
Legacy-ZARunning out? Stop drinking the cool aid that you are on. :roll: :laugh:





There are oceans of sand and not just in Africa.
Here you go
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.
KarymidoNwww.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand

dude is just reading bbcnews stuff, don't blame him.
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?

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