And specially stabilized buildings? "NOBODY MOVE! WE'RE ETCHING!"
That was several generations ago, I'm looking forward to seeing what is required to manufacture with high yield at 7nm!
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-industr...
Chip manufacturers like Intel and IBM have regularly made good on promises of exponential progress for at least a half century. Comparing them to press release-pushing biomedical researchers is tantamount to a slur.
> Comparing them [chip manufacturers] to press release-pushing biomedical researchers is tantamount to a slur.
No, it isn't. Slower progress in biomedical research isn't a result of biomedical researchers exhibiting any of the qualities whose unwarranted attribution normally constitutes slur. It is the result of much greater complexity, lower predictability, higher safety requirements and weaker human understanding of biological systems compared to semiconductors.
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...).
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.
And moore's law probably won't return to life, until we learn how to solve that problem, which the current work doesn't help with.
The CEO of Applied Materials, Gary Dickerson, has stated that the 450mm wafer timeline “has definitely been pushed out from a timing standpoint.” That’s incredibly important, because the economics of 450mm wafers were tied directly to the economics of another struggling technology — EUV. EUV is the follow-up to 193nm lithography that’s used for etching wafers, but it’s a technology that’s spent over a decade mired in technological problems and major ramp-up concerns.
Toasting to the death of Moore's Law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx-FINEI
Well, incremental lab improvements of this and that technique do make it into practice all the time. The failure of various biological researches is symptom of some fundamental brokenness or inherent hardness to biological research (biological systems are inherently messy - the ability of biologists to work with uniform, mass-produced mice is actually a hindrance when they try to apply those researches to non-uniform humans, etc). None of these apply to chip manufacture. The increase in quantum effects as one goes down in size may be a barrier to 7nm but it seems like it would a barrier to working one-off chips as well as to final production.
Which is to say, the skepticism doesn't seem to have a basis. A working chip is an important and necessary step to getting to mass production - clearly mass production would be their aim.
Your supposedly better link agrees: "While it should be stressed that commercial 7nm chips remain at least two years away, this test chip from IBM and its partners is extremely significant for three reasons: it's a working sub-10nm chip (this is pretty significant in itself); it's the first commercially viable sub-10nm FinFET logic chip that uses silicon-germanium as the channel material; and it appears to be the first commercially viable design produced with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography."
(Ex.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/45_nanometer#Example:_Intel.27... )
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.
(tldr: 193nm light works down to 28nm lambda; progress requires moving further into UV and/or use immersing in liquid with different refractive index)
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 :)
Unfortunately this won't sell new consumer hardware on an regular basis.
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.
As an idea, I feel it's wonderful. It would massively reduce wastage.
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
This is THE chance.
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)...
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
Also hasn't Ibm just sold its division to global foundries? So are they double dipping as usual by licensing them new tech separately?
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.
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.
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/
Example direction to go in: 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?
