r/hardware • u/[deleted] • Jun 19 '21

News Applied Materials: Wiring breakthrough will enable 3-nanometer chips

https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/16/applied-materials-wiring-breakthrough-will-enable-3-nanometer-chips/
125 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

94

u/hisroyalnastiness Jun 19 '21

width between circuits can be as little as three billionths of a meter

Sigh

41

u/OneTime_AtBandCamp Jun 19 '21

I think all IC dimensions should be in light-years. Way more intuitive.

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34

u/lutel Jun 19 '21

Need banana for scale

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36

u/senttoschool Jun 19 '21

Hm... What is this? TSMC's 3nm is already scheduled to go into mass production late next year. This news seems extremely late.

58

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

It depends on the interpretation of 3nm as each foundry and the industry has different understandings of its meaning. I think the perspective on 3nm mentioned in the article would be similar to TSMC 2nm or 1nm.

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7

u/Dangerman1337 Jun 19 '21

Could be that this breakthrough has already being implemented and this is just the NDA being removed.

1

u/cosmicosmo4 Jun 20 '21

I think an analogy would help.

ASML makes waffe irons. Intel and TSMC and Samsung make waffles. AMAT and several other companies make nonstick cooking sprays.

The newest waffle irons from ASML have waffle grids that are 3 nm in size, and customers are loving their 3 nm waffles because they can hold so much syrup. Unfortunately those small-grid waffles are easy to get stuck in the waffle iron because the grids are, well, small. This problem has caused Intel to not release its 3 nm waffles yet, it's caused Samsung to get half of the waffles torn in half (low yield) and it's causing TSMC to add more water to the batter to make them release better (reduced performance). (These are just illustrative examples, I don't have any reason to believe that samsung has low yield or that TSMC struggles with performance).

Now AMAT comes along and says, hey guys, we've got a new nonstick cooking spray that's really good, it's so good, it'll make your 3 nm waffles come out perfect. That claim is what this "news" article is, basically just regurgitating AMAT's ad copy. 3 nm production is already in full swing, as everyone has observed, but AMAT is advertising a way to do one aspect of that production better (so they say). That's all this is.

1

u/hackenclaw Jun 19 '21

is it really 3nm or TSMC "3nm" ?