Will 7nm and 5nm CPU Process Tech Really Happen?

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Will 7nm and 5nm CPU Process Tech Really Happen?

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 20, 2014 @02:58AM from the less-is-more dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This article provides a technical look at the challenges in scaling chip production ever downward in the semiconductor industry. Chips based on a 22nm process are running in consumer devices around the world, and 14nm development is well underway. But as we approach 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm, the low-hanging fruit disappears, and several fundamental components need huge technological advancement to be built. Quoting: "In the near term, the leading-edge chip roadmap looks clear. Chips based on today's finFETs and planar FDSOI technologies will scale to 10nm. Then, the gate starts losing control over the channel at 7nm, prompting the need for a new transistor architecture. ... The industry faces some manufacturing challenges beyond 10nm. The biggest hurdle is lithography. To reduce patterning costs, Imec's CMOS partners hope to insert extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography by 7nm. But EUV has missed several market windows and remains delayed, due to issues with the power source. ... By 7nm, the industry may require both EUV and multiple patterning. 'At 7nm, we need layers down to a pitch of about 21nm,' said Adam Brand, senior director of the Transistor Technology Group at Applied Materials. 'That's already below the pitch of EUV by itself. To do a layer like the fin at 21nm, it's going to take EUV plus double patterning to round out of the gate. So clearly, the future of the industry is a combination of these technologies.'"

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Car analogy? by sinij · 2014-06-20 03:04 · Score: 4, Funny

Could someone explain to me why further refinement of fabrication process is the only way to progress? With a car analogy?
1. Re:Car analogy? by 50000BTU_barbecue · 2014-06-20 03:05 · Score: 2
  
  Drivers are getting fatter and fatter, and the only way to get the car to move at the same speed is by continually improving the car... to end up at the same speed as before.
  
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2. Re:Car analogy? by spire3661 · 2014-06-20 03:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Lets extend this. You can only bore out the cylinders so much before you have to start looking at a new design or your cylinder walls will be too thin.
  
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3. Re:Car analogy? by DahGhostfacedFiddlah · 2014-06-20 03:41 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  We're trying to make smaller and smaller cars out of silicon, because then we can fit more cars onto parking lots. The number of cars we can fit onto a parking lot has been doubling approximately every 18 months for the past half-century, but we appear to be approaching some hard physical limits for the actual size of cars. In addition to the limits imposed by the size of the cars themselves (below a certain size, cars start interacting at a quantum level with the other cars around them), there are also challenges inherent in manufacturing cars at such a tiny scale. There is some new car-making technology on the horizon that may resolve these issues by using higher-frequency car-making lasers in our car foundries. But top researchers still have technical hurdles to pass before they can manufacture cars that are smaller than 7nm.
  
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4. Re:Car analogy? by alen · 2014-06-20 03:44 · Score: 2
  
  same with cars
  30 years ago you had an AM radio, you needed a V8 for 190hp and dozens of features we take for granted today may have been thought of to be only on ultra luxury cars. not like we had navigation, blue tooth and lots of other gizmos in cars. a lot of the safety features and the new features people want suck up gas as well
5. Re:Car analogy? by Opportunist · 2014-06-20 03:55 · Score: 2
  
  Yeah, but brakes would break occasionally for no reason, or it would just not start for no good reason, you could only drive on roads that the car makers approved and only transport goods that were approved to be transported by this specific kind of car, you'd have to get a new car every other year because you would not get any service for your old one anymore, people could easily hotwire your cars and drive away with them and everyone would tell you whatever goes wrong with it, it's only YOUR fault, not the manufacturers'.
  
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6. Re:Car analogy? by Zak3056 · 2014-06-20 04:01 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Everyone wants faster, cheaper, and lighter cars, but you cannae break the laws o' physics, captain.
  That doesn't sound like breaking the laws of physics: making the car lighter will make it faster, as well as (assuming you avoid exotic materials) making it cheaper.
  
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7. Re:Car analogy? by drinkypoo · 2014-06-20 05:16 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  That doesn't sound like breaking the laws of physics: making the car lighter will make it faster, as well as (assuming you avoid exotic materials) making it cheaper.
  It's not breaking the laws of physics, but it is ignoring the current state of materials technology. You have to build a lot of cars before you can get the cost of building an aluminum body down to the same as the cost of building a steel body, and carbon fiber (the only other credible alternative today) is always more expensive.
  Also, they forgot "stronger". Cars which have a more rigid body not only handle better but they're actually more comfortable, because the suspension can be designed around a more rigid, predictable body. Getting all four of those things in the same package is the real challenge.
  
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8. Re:Car analogy? by drinkypoo · 2014-06-20 05:21 · Score: 2
  
  a lot of the safety features and the new features people want suck up gas as well
  Safety, yes. But none of the new features people want weigh anything notable. Indeed, most of them come free with the size reduction associated with modernization. If you replace a bunch of relays with some logic and a couple of relays then you can also add automation along with it and the whole thing actually weighs less. Even the lightest cars today have ABS, traction control, and yaw control, and virtually no cars [in the USA] are not offered with AC. Even modern adaptive suspension requires very little additional equipment, if it uses ferrofluids that is.
  In fact, virtually all the weight increase in modern cars that doesn't relate directly to crash safety has to do with asphalt, added for sound deadening. That's the primary difference between (for example) a Toyota and a Lexus. Sometimes the Lexus has a fancier powerplant than you can get in a Toyota, but then the same sort of thing will make it there within a few years. I'm just picking on them because I like to, it's the same with all uprated marques, whether it's infiniti to nissan or even mercury to ford. More asphalt, same car.
  
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9. Re:Car analogy? by LittlePud · 2014-06-20 08:36 · Score: 2
  
  We're trying to make smaller and smaller cars out of silicon, because then we can fit more cars onto parking lots. The number of cars we can fit onto a parking lot has been doubling approximately every 18 months for the past half-century, but we appear to be approaching some hard physical limits for the actual size of cars. In addition to the limits imposed by the size of the cars themselves (below a certain size, cars start interacting at a quantum level with the other cars around them), there are also challenges inherent in manufacturing cars at such a tiny scale. There is some new car-making technology on the horizon that may resolve these issues by using higher-frequency car-making lasers in our car foundries. But top researchers still have technical hurdles to pass before they can manufacture cars that are smaller than 7nm.
  Easier car analogy: you can only shrink the car so much before the limiting factor is not the size of your cars, but how precisely (and how thin) you can paint the parking lines.
e-beam lithography? by by+(1706743) · 2014-06-20 03:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Clearly e-beam has some serious issues (throughput, to name one...), but progress is being made on that front. For instance, http://www.mapperlithography.c... ( http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... -- though it appears there's only a Dutch entry...).
Re:For a sense of scale by mc6809e · 2014-06-20 03:34 · Score: 5, Informative

We're already at the point where 22nm components are more expensive per transistor than those at 28nm.
Previous shrinks lowered the cost of each transistor. It doesn't look like it's going to happen after 28nm.
Re:For a sense of scale by Old97 · 2014-06-20 03:41 · Score: 2

Then IBM would saddle it with some really complex, bloated, crappy middleware called "WebSphere Atomic Appliance for Business". It would be more expensive and run slower than a no-name Intel based blade running Linux and an open source framework. You'd need their professional services to manage it for you.

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Low Hanging Fruit by necro81 · 2014-06-20 03:44 · Score: 4, Funny

I am amused by this bit in the summary:

But as we approach 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm, the low-hanging fruit disappears
I'd say the low-hanging fruit disappeared a few decades ago. Continuing down the feature size curve has for many years required a whole slew of every-more-complicated tricks and techniques.

That said: yes, going forward is going to be increasingly difficult. You will eventually reach an insurmountable limit that no amount of trickery or technology will be able to overcome. I predict it'll be somewhere around the 0 nm process node.
1. Re:Low Hanging Fruit by mr_mischief · 2014-06-20 05:55 · Score: 2
  
  The part of HP's work that applies here isn't the memristor. That's a low-cost SRAM (as opposed to DRAM). HP does have something to say about electron leakage, though. Their photonic interconnects use photons rather than electrons, hence the name.
Will it last with 10yrs of continuous use? by mrflash818 · 2014-06-20 04:00 · Score: 4, Insightful

I worry about the reliability with tinyer and tinyer CPU feature size. ...how will those CPUs be doing, reliability-wise, 10yrs later?
When I buy something 'expensive', I expect it to last at least 10yrs, and CPUs are kinda expensive, to me.
(I still have an Athlon Thunderbird 700MHz Debian workstation that I use, for example, and it's still reliable.)

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1. Re:Will it last with 10yrs of continuous use? by Tablizer · 2014-06-20 09:33 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I worry about the reliability with tinyer and tinyer CPU feature size
  I'n usiing a 5nm protTotype,, andd it~s doingn &` ju ust f%ne. Don^t b be~a worRy waqrt#!
  
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Re:For a sense of scale by necro81 · 2014-06-20 04:02 · Score: 2

When you are printing a 10nm wire into the silicon chip, you are not very far from doing it atom by atom as the wire is only like 50 atoms wide.
Perhaps, but at least with lithography you can do it across the entire wafer (or die) area in a single go. That's batch processing all the transistors at once, rather than serially processing them with AFM.
Re:Same story by rahvin112 · 2014-06-20 04:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

There is a limit we'll hit eventually, we're approaching circuits that are single digit atoms wide. No matter what we'll never get a circuit less than a single atom. Don't get me wrong, I don't think 10nm is going to be the problem but somewhere around single digit atoms wide we're going to run out of options to make them smaller.
Re:For a sense of scale by ifiwereasculptor · 2014-06-20 04:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Kind of. Heat dissipation starts being a bigger problem, and thermally limit slock speed. Look at overclocking sandy bridge vs ivy bridge chips.
Re:what was the excuse for 90nm again? by TechyImmigrant · 2014-06-20 05:05 · Score: 2

I read an article in the Apple ][ days claiming going beyond 16MHz was impossible, given track to track inductance.

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Re:Same story by drinkypoo · 2014-06-20 05:25 · Score: 2

There is a limit we'll hit eventually, we're approaching circuits that are single digit atoms wide. No matter what we'll never get a circuit less than a single atom.
We'll go optical, and we'll use photons...

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"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
CMOS scaling limited by process variation by Theovon · 2014-06-20 05:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

There are a number of factors that affect the value of technology scaling. One major one is the increase in power density due to the end of supply and threshold voltage scaling. But one factor that some people miss is process variation (random dopant fluctuation, gate length and wire width variability, etc.).
Using some data from ITRS and some of my own extrapoliations from historical data, I tried to work out when process variation alone would make further scaling ineffective. Basically, when you scale down, you get a speed and power advantage (per gate), but process variation makes circuit delay less predictable, so we have to add a guard band. At what point will the decrease in average delay become equal to the increase in guard band?
It turns out to be at exactly 5nm. The “disappointing” aspect of this (for me) is that 5nm was already believed to be the end of CMOS scaling before I did the calculation. :)
Incidentally, if you multiply out the guard bands already applied for process variation, supply voltage variation, aging, and temperature variation, we find that for an Ivy Bridge processor, about 70% of the energy going in is “wasted” on guard bands. In other words, if we could eliminate those safety margins, the processor would use 1/3.5 as much energy for the same performance or run 2.5 times faster in the same power envelope. Of course, we can’t eliminate all of them, but some factors, like temperature, change so slowly that you can shrink the safety margin by making it dynamic.
1. Re:CMOS scaling limited by process variation by Anonymous Coward · 2014-06-20 11:14 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Are you taking into account depletely-depleted MOS with controlled bias?
  As I understand it, the Vt of the junction in present devices is controlled by the dopant level in the channel, and the source of Vt variation is from the shot noise in implantation. If you can increase the dopant concentration by 5x, you also decrease the variation due to shot noise by 5x. To compensate for the deeply depleted junction, you now need to add a body electrode to all the gates to bias them correctly, and a power supply tree for the biasing network. There is a silver lining, the Vt bias can be adjusted along with Vdd and clock frequency scaling so the device uses less power when idle.
  I'm probably explaining it badly, here is the talk from Hot chips 24 (third speaker).
  -puddingpimp
Re:For a sense of scale by mc6809e · 2014-06-20 05:57 · Score: 4, Informative

There are other advantages to shrinking components. Higher clock rates become possible.

You'd think so, but the problem is global interconnect. Not gates. It was all the way back at the 250nm node when interconnect and gate delay were about the same.
At the 28nm node, wire delay is responsible for something like 80% of the time it takes for signals to work their way through a circuit.
And it some cases inverters are actually used to help signals propagate more quickly down long wires. In other words, long wires are so slow compared to gates that adding gates can speed things up!
EUV not going to happen by edxwelch · 2014-06-20 06:29 · Score: 2

An interesting article here discribes the horrendiously difficult challenges that face EUV:
https://www.semiwiki.com/forum...
Memristance by Suiggy · 2014-06-20 07:14 · Score: 2

The problem is that memristance effects begin to manifest below 5nm
Thus, start using memristors to build IMP-FALSE logic circuits.
Re:Technical by Guspaz · 2014-06-20 07:16 · Score: 2

The problem with stacking is the thermal/power situation. Specifically, how much power can a processor use before it's impractical to power and cool it? And when you have two or more processor dies stacked on top of eachother, the heatsink is only going to contact the topmost one. How do you remove that heat from the bottom one?
I suspect the answers to those questions are, it's not practical to use that much more power that we use in high-end desktop chips today (150-200W is probably the limit of practicality), and I recall some interesting stuff from IBM years ago where they were building vertical cooling channels into CPU dies to handle stacking, so that the heat could be moved from lower dies up to where it could be removed.
Perhaps the approach could be going with CPU designs that optimize for power consumption rather than performance (but still more efficient, consuming less power per unit of work), and then stack a bunch of them.
Re:For a sense of scale by hairyfeet · 2014-06-20 07:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

And this little tidbit I'm sure has CPU OEMs scared....they passed "good enough" on their designs and went so far into "insanely overpowered" that consumers really have no reason to buy before the previous unit dies.
Take what I'm typing on as an example, its an HP Pro 3000 which since it came with Vista (which I of course upgraded to Win 7, putting 32bit Vista on a PC with 4GB? WTH HP?) I would date it around 07-08. It has a Pentium Dual at 2.7Ghz, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB HDD....how many home users are actually gonna be able to max this out? I pound the shit out of this machine, downloading drivers and burning discs and yanking data off of memory cards, often at the same time, and it just purrs, so why buy a new one? Now we are seeing the same thing with ARM, my dad recently picked up a tablet I recommended which has 4 cores, 1GB of RAM and 8GB of onboard storage, final cost? $140 shipped, the odds that he will be able to max it out? pretty much zero. this thing has enough power it can easily drive his widescreen TV over HDMI, surf, chat, and gets great battery life...what motivation does he have to buy a new one?
Lets face it X86 systems have become like washers and dryers, no need to get a new before the old one dies. Hell this is even true for gamers, my gaming PC at home is fricking 5 years old now which is ancient history in the PC world yet with a hexacore, 8GB of RAM, and 3TB of HDD space the only thing I've had to do since buying it is upgrade my GPU. That's it, that is all I've had to do and I'm playing Bioshock Infinite and Far Cry 3 and anything else i want to play with plenty of bling and decent framerates. We are seeing X86 play out on fast forward with ARM now going up to octocore because MHz bumps are getting harder to do without blowing the power budget, there is just no reason to buy before the current one dies which I'm sure is scarier than trying to hit 14nm to Intel and TSMC.

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Re:what was the excuse for 90nm again? by Bryan+Ischo · 2014-06-20 08:14 · Score: 3, Informative

I remember the 90's too and I don't remember any of that.
The race to 1 GHz were heady, optimistic days, and I don't recall anyone thinking that once we got there, it would all be over.
So I call bullshit on your post.
Re:what was the excuse for 90nm again? by Orestesx · 2014-06-20 08:45 · Score: 2

Yeah but I also remember an article saying that the universal speed limit is 300,000 km/hr and that one seems to have held up. There is a physical limit at some point.
Re:This affects our entire industry by david_thornley · 2014-06-20 09:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

You do realize that we've been in that situation since the dawn of computers, don't you? Once we get close to filling needs, people come up with other needs. Once processor development more or less stalls out, people will still want better performance, but they won't get it by updating their systems any more. Software development is a pretty secure profession.

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