TSMC, Samsung process: Are 5nm and 3nm chips really the best? The situation is far from simple!
There is an opinion circulating on the Internet that Moore's Law, after 28 nm, has actually come to an end.
Starting at 28 nanometers, nanoscale processes no longer depend on transistor density, gate length, semi-metallic wire spacing, and so on.
Since 28 nm, a similar process has begun in the chip manufacturing process.
To be precise, the chip manufacturing process before 28 nm refers to the gate length of the transistor. This process shrinks by 30 percent, or only 70 percent, with each generation.
That's why they choose 90 nm, 65 nm, 45 nm and other processes, but after 28 nm, the gate length can no longer be reduced, so chip manufacturers don't use the gate length to name it.
With the passage of time, the performance, power consumption, and area of the chip are constantly improving.
Even if the gate length is not reduced by 30 percent, it can still be considered a next-generation process.
This is also the reason why TSMC and Samsung are called chip manufacturing technologies after 28 nm.
But in fact, this is not an easy thing to do, the stagnation of the linewidth process does not mean that Moore's Law has come to an end, it does not mean that the process is a **.
In the last decade, while there hasn't been much progress in linewidths and gates, everyone is trying to stack transistors in 3D and convert them to "equivalent processes".
This is also a very high technical requirement, and it is also a very technical technology.
For example, 7 nm is more advanced than 10 nm, and although they are all the same process, 5 nm is more advanced than 7 nm, and 3 nm is more advanced than 5 nm, so we can't just look at whether the grid is shrunk or not.
It is a very difficult thing in itself to improve the performance of the chip to a smaller degree on the basis of the chip, and it is simply impossible to do this without enough experience and technology.
At the same time, many people think that if the process technology does not improve, they can catch up with TSMC and Samsung, but this is only a one-sided statement, and it is not an easy thing to do, because competitors will not sit idly by and wait for Chinese chipmakers to catch up, and we can't expect others to improve, so what we have to do is to give up illusions and be ready to fight.