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Samsung Reaches Milestone For 14nm Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Samsung announced a milestone on its development of 14nm manufacturing semiconductors, claiming that it offers major advantages to system-on-chip devices using in consumer electronic products (especially lower power). They recently taped out a Cortex-A7 processor with this technology, calling it a significant milestone for the fabless ecosystem."
What is fabless ecosystem?
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Apple should sue them for "method and apparatus" to make something smaller.
THL phish sticks
These are ARM based chips and they are completely dominating, if Intel had 30 years of advanced technology they wouldn't be so far behind on the low powered chip side of things.
Umm, no. They had a hell of a time moving to 22nm and getting volume production up, pretty much your entire post is just paranoid delusion.
Intel just has more money to throw at the problems, and they've managed to get a lead of a few years on the other companies. They only maintain that lead because they keep pushing forward.
The problem is that makes it harder for everybody else to compete, but that's not really Intel's fault.
Mod post ignorant. If that were true, AMD wouldnt have been so far superior to Intel back in the P4 / Pentium D days.
Fact is it takes about 3-5 years for this tech to be fully realized, and Intel is currently (AFAIK) the only one with solid 22nm production simply because their R&D budget is huge. If you find that scary or whatever you can send your dollars to AMD to help them get up to speed.
"Tape out" is a term of art of the processor industry. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape-out where the first sentence will tell you "In electronics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design cycle for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards, the point at which the artwork for the photomask of a circuit is sent for manufacture."
"Fabless ecosystem" is another term of art of the processor industry. Wikipedia is similarly helpful here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabless_manufacturing -- where the first sentence will read "Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry."
STFW FTW.
"Tape out" is in my dad's generation they used the same tech for photolithography for both PCBs and ICs. In other words a "Draftsman" (which is kind of like a CAD operator, but manual, done by hand) using what looks like black electrical tape stripes on clear mylar sheets. Then a projector blasts UV light thru the marked up sheet onto a photosensitive copper circuit board, or silicon slice, and where the UV hits the plastic polymerizes and is "permanent" and where it doesn't, it washes away. Sorta like a photo negative enlarger but more of a shrinker than an enlarger... which is another mostly dead technology. You'll meet people who rewrite history for laughs who claim the "tape" is magnetic tape of cad drafting or maybe Verilog/VHDL. In the "biz" it means the dev team has ended work and the responsibility is now entirely on the production team (assuming it achieves production level success on the first try, without any design issues ruining yield, LOL)
"Fabless ecosystem" is fru fru talk for you outsource your manufacturing to a company (usually a competitor) you trust to give you reliable access to their best processes, while trusting them not to "pirate" your IP which is your companies only resource. Its a great idea for weird stuff where you can corner the market or R+D or teaching. Strikes me as an idiotic business model for competitive "mainstream" processors or generic commodity chips.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
One could think that this announcement of 14nm development is Samsung one-upping their competition.
Another interpretation is that companies need to exercise "continuous disclosure" in order to be taken seriously in the share markets and not fall foul of the market regulators which insist that companies reveal important information as soon as is practicable so that investors and possible investors get a true picture of the company's market worth. In most cases, a good-news story is a great way to have the market clamouring to invest, and so assists the company to raise the capital needed to get its developments to market.
It also does not hurt to rub the nose of the opposition.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
They recently taped out a Cortex-A7 processor with this technology, calling it a significant milestone for the fabless ecosystem."
I'm very good at the English language but I have no idea what this means. How do you 'tape out' a processor? What's a 'fabless ecosystem'? (The rainforests are rather wonderful, I hear.)
"Taping out" is the process of laying out the actual lines that will become the paths of the circuit. This used to be done with actual tape and photographed and reduced in size. Somehow I doubt they actually used that method with this and more likely the work was all done on a computer.
I can only assume a "fabless ecosystem" is a fancy way of saying "the industry of making something when you don't make anything" or chip design/IP creation.
you know AMD is only 10 months younger than intel right? or that Acron computers, where the ARM guys came from has been developing their cpu since the 1980's?
cause you make it sound like they just popped up out of nowhere yesterday, or maybe that's just your uninformed tinfoil hat conspiracy that intel, 2pac and sea lab are really ruling the world.
on Apple's patents on "making something", "thinking about making something", and "dropping acid to free your mind to think about making something"?
Trademarks can be lost or weakened by not taking action, this does not apply to patents.
I will agree that there are a lot of clueless people around tho.
Then our SSDs will survive a whole SEVEN program/erase cycles.
Pretty big difference:
Intel is selling millions of processors made with a 22nm process right now.
Samsung just finished designing a processor that will enter prototyping soon/is being tested. Their process may have horrible yields, be too costly or have any number of problems. This "milestone" is akin to having the tech drawings of a car ready - it's hype until we see results.
Last I checked, most Samsung silicon was at 28nm, I think, with NAND flash at 23/22nm.