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Intel's Roadmap Includes 4nm Fab in 2022
Precision submits "Intel Corp., the largest maker of chips in the world, has outlined plans to make chips using 4nm process technology in about thirteen years. According to Intel, integration capacity of chips will increase much higher compared to fabrication process."
The next step of the plan: negative-sized chips by 2050!
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Silicon's radius is 110 picometers which translates to .11 nanometers.
It just happens that my personal roadmap for 2022 includes a flying pony that craps gold. I'm cautiously optimistic.
Or...
Google claims that it's about 0.022 beard-seconds.
You are correct, they plan to transition from silicon to unobtainium.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
3D chip layouts are part of this roadmap. This kind of roadmap isn't really intended to say what their process will be, however. It's intended to give numbers to their core design teams about how many transistors they will be able to play with, what the latencies will be, and so on. These teams will then start working on designs on the assumption that the predictions are correct, then tweak them a bit if they were wrong. If they go badly wrong, you get something like the Pentium 4.
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The atomic radius is not the proper distance to consider. If you do so, you assume that atoms can touch each other, which is very far from the truth. The closest distance "allowed" is the first nearest-neighbor (NN), which is related to the crystal lattice constant (for Si: 0.543 nm), and the crystal structure (Si has a diamond structure). For Si that NN distance is 0.235 nm. This is all very much academic tough. Even if you could make a circuit that small, you would then have to wonder, left alone quantum-size effects, leakage, behavior under oxidation, etc.
"After all there's a reason you're not actually working in enginerring, when you're such a great engineer..."
Yeah - the pay is better.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
There have been formal semiconductor roadmaps to the future since 1992. There's an consensus roadmap updated annually by an industry group.
This isn't a blue-sky thing. It tells all the players what they need to do to keep up their part of the technology. The fab-equipment people, the device physics people, the etching people, the mask people, the substrate people, the design tools people, etc. all have to push their parts forward. The roadmap tells them how far each piece has to be pushed.
These roadmaps are available for past years, and you can see how the industry has tracked the roadmap. It's reasonably close for any five year period. The big change in the last decade is that heat dissipation is starting to dominate the problem. The roadmap now focuses on memory devices, which have low activity per cell compared to compute elements and aren't yet power-limited.
The current consensus is that the improvements to known technology can get down to 22nm, and then it gets hard. The roadmap assumes CMOS transistors; other devices are discussed, but aren't factored into the mainline predictions.
Actually, I have been privy to Intel planning for many years, as I used to work there. It takes many years to develop the next generation uP. That means that the 16 nm devices are already in initial design stages. Since the overall design process is such a big job, all the supporting hardware is a major part of the design process. Like the fab hardware. So, no, much of this roadmap is not a thought experiment, but already many projects with many members working on the pieces. Otherwise, the plan would never come together when its time has arrived.
wake up and hold your nose