Wen Wang Xinxi.
While we are still worried about the 7nm process, chip giants such as TSMC are already advancing 2nm. TSMC, Samsung, and Intel will all compete in 2nm in 2025.
According to TrendForce, TSMC is actively promoting the 2nm process node, and the first machine is scheduled to enter the factory in April 2024. And TSMC and Samsung both plan to start mass production of 2nm process chips in 2025, and the battle between the two sides has begun.
At present, TSMC has shown the 2nm process prototype test results to major customers such as Apple and NVIDIAAnd Samsung has also launched a 2nm prototype, which will offer a lower price in order to attract high-profile customers, including Nvidia. It is reported that TSMC has once again grabbed Apple's order, which is expected to be used on the iPhone 17 Pro that will be launched in 2025.
In principle, the 2nm process chip is also different from the previous chips, it needs to implant 300 million transistors per square millimeter, which is equivalent to plugging nearly 40 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail.
This number is about twice that of the current mainstream 5nm chips. With such a huge increase and terrifying density, it is necessary to expand the chip manufacturing technology from the 2D plane to the 3D three-dimensional level, stacking upwards like building blocks, in order to further improve the density of transistors.
This is not a small difficulty.
At present, some netizens have begun to question the 2nm process launched by TSMC: now TSMC's 3nm and Samsung's 3nm, the performance improvement is too insignificant, and it is not like the improvement of 7 to 5. "Apple's 5nm hand warmer, is this 5nm blown out?”
Earlier, communication expert Xiang Ligang also questioned this, he said that the high-speed iteration of the chip process is likely to be a **. Because after 2016, under the promotion of TSMC, the high-speed iteration of the chip manufacturing process was hyped, but in terms of the actual user experience, the chip below the 7nm chip did not have a substantial experience improvement.
In fact, what further detonated doubts in the industry was the iPhone 15 with the A17 chip, which is a 3nm process. According to everyone's understanding of 3nm, there is a huge difference between 3nm and 7nm in terms of performance and power consumption, so it should be that the mobile phone performs far better than other mobile phones in terms of fluency and power consumption, but the feedback from the actual experience of consumers is not so.
At the beginning of October, the phone15 pro was hotly searched, which sparked extensive discussions in foreign media, and Apple later officially admitted that all four newly released iPhone15 mobile phones were abnormally hot.
According to IBM's evaluation, 2nm technology will be 45% higher in performance than 7nm technology, and power consumption can be reduced by 75% under the same performance. Based on this, it is speculated that TSMC 2nm will receive a similar boost.
However, some users also began to question this performance increase, and some users said that the performance increase did not exceed 15%, and the Apple 15 chip is the best example.
Why has the chip manufacturing process been questioned repeatedly, and what is the future development direction of the chip manufacturing process?To understand this problem, we have to start with the manufacturing process.
Behind the upgrade of the chip manufacturing process, 2nm may no longer be the 2nm we understand
There are a large number of transistors on the chip, and the process is the length of the channel between the source and drain of the transistor. The current inside the transistor flows from the starting point (source) to the end point (drain) through a gate whose width (gate length) is the nanometer unit of the chip. Nanometer originally referred to the size of the gate length of a chip transistor.
As the technology matures, transistor size decreases, resulting in higher performance, lower power consumption, and lower heat generation. In short, smaller transistors are better than larger transistors, and intergenerational improvements in process nodes are similar between manufacturers.
However, over the past few decades, with various proprietary improvements in integrated circuit design (from planar transistors to various types of 3D transistors) and manufacturing processes, it has become more complex to measure performance gain based solely on transistor size.
Below 28nm, these numbers do not match the actual node and gate length, as well as the half-pitch, due to the use of new technologies such as FinFETs. Therefore, the current 7nm and 5nm are no longer the gate length originally referred to. Therefore, the 3nm process chip is no longer directly related to the size of the transistor.
This means that chips for two generations of process nodes (e.g., 5nm and 3nm) manufactured by the same manufacturer do not necessarily correspond to process node names. If the actual size of a 5nm process is 20nm, then it marks its 8nm process as 2nm, which is actually no problem.
Because it is no longer the same set of standards, your family is such 3nm, and his family is such 3nm, even if the 16nm process may not really reach the 16nm size. It's hard to judge the true level of processes based on superficial process numbers alone.
TSMC pushes 2nm, if we understand the principle of 2nm technology from the traditional level,It is necessary to expand the chip manufacturing technology from the 2D plane to the 3D three-dimensional level, similar to the evolution from building a house from building a small flat floor to building a high-rise building, and from 2D to 3D stacking needs to rebuild a chip manufacturing system from various fields such as design, materials, manufacturing, and packaging.
The difficulty of this is not trivial, the research and development and intensity to be invested is very large, some people in the industry have made an analogy: to build a high-rise building, you have to design the drawings first, right?And then the foundation has to be a little deeper, right?Isn't it more complicated to wire and water pipes?Do you have to change the materials a little better?Even the machines that build buildings are different.
But in fact, whether it can achieve this high level of sophistication, whether the manufacturer is doing 3nm++ or the real 2nm, outsiders do not know.
In the past, TSMC's Philip Wong revealed in the Hot Chips 31 keynote: "It used to be a technology node, a node number, which means some function on the wafer. But: "Today, these numbers are just numbers. They're like car models – like the BMW 5 Series or the Mazda 6. It doesn't matter what the number is, it's just the destination of the next piece of technology, its name. ”
It can be known from the words of TSMC executivesThe 2nm we understand may not be the same concept as the 2nm they made, and the name of the node is not actually equivalent to the upgrade, but more of an iterative node number.
Intel has even abandoned similar names earlier, and renamed Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20A. Intel 7 can be considered a +++ version of the original 10nm;Intel 4 corresponds to 7 nM and Intel 3 corresponds to 7 nM +;Whereas Intel 20A corresponds to 5nm, while 18A corresponds to 5nm+.
It can be seen that the standards of each company are different, in which the marketing meaning is getting stronger and stronger, behind the chip process upgrade, 2nm may no longer be the 2nm we understand.
Is the era of coil process over?
In fact, judging from the word-of-mouth performance of the iPhone15 series, the era of the volume process has passed, and many users have found that the mobile phone they bought 3 years ago, the 12nm process, is still as fast as lightning, and it feels like they can fight for several more years.
iPhone15The series uses a 3nm chip,It's not that the power consumption is reduced,The heating problem is still prominent,From the perspective of product experience and reputation,iPhone15The experience reputation has not been blessed because of 3nm,Everyone is not obvious at the perception level。 Consumers pay more attention to product differentiation and innovation and the overall product comprehensive experience.
Judging from the Mate60 series evaluation, it has done very well in terms of performance, smoothness and power consumption, and its running score is also very strong, which can easily cope with various challenges such as multitasking and high-load games.
In fact, for both manufacturers and consumers, the cost increase brought about by process upgrades is becoming less and less cost-effective.
We know that the mass production of state-of-the-art process chips is a systematic project, which requires the joint progress and iteration of upstream and downstream equipment, materials, IP and other technology manufacturers in the industrial chain, and it is very expensiveTSMC's 2nm foundry price has been **, nearly 2$50,000 for wafers, compared to $3nm-$20,000 for wafers, 4 for 5nm-1$60,000 tablets, 6 7nm-$10,000 tablets.
The overall chip foundry cost is getting higher and higher, and the foundry cost to be borne by manufacturers is getting higher and higher, but the performance upgrade provided by the chip process is not as big as imagined, and now the mobile phone performance is in an era of excess, and the overall experience upgrade brings about the operation feeling is not obvious, and consumers are gradually not so cold to the high premium of the chip process.
From the current point of view, whether today's 3nm and 2nm are a marketing means used to persuade consumers and manufacturers to pay for new products, which means that if China overcomes 7nm, the gap with 3nm and 2nm may not be as big as imagined.
From the current point of view, the next volume of the mobile phone industry should be the system and ecology, as long as the domestic chip solves the power consumption and yield, the continuous iterative upgrading of the system, the mobile phone experience will only be smoother, and the comprehensive cost performance of the mobile phone is higher, therefore, the process will no longer be the biggest obstacle to the domestic *** catching up with Apple, from this point of view, we still have the opportunity to overtake in the corner.
Author: Wang Xinxi, TMT Senior Commentator This article is rejected without permission** Author's WeChat*** Smart New Connection.