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Intel Moving Forward With 10nm, Will Switch Away From Silicon For 7nm
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun talking about its plans for future CPU architectures. The company is already working on a 10nm manufacturing process, and expects the first such chips to be ready by early 2017. Beyond that, things are getting difficult. Intel says it will need to move away from silicon when it develops a 7nm process. "The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn't provided any specific details yet." Even the current 14nm chips they're making ran into unexpected difficulties. "While Intel didn't provide any specifics, we strongly suspect that we're looking at the arrival of transistors based on III-V semiconductors. III-V semiconductors have higher electron mobility than silicon, which means that they can be fashioned into smaller and faster (as in higher switching speed) transistors."
Amazing that we're getting to 7nm, and rather than saying we can't do it, there's just casual talk about how they will have to switch away from silicone. Really incredible. Will they just keep marching forward to less than 7nm and into other exotic configs?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Moore's Law had a good run, but she's dead Jim. Two, maybe 3 shrinks at most, and you're at the end of getting benefit from feature size.
If you think the performance increases the last decade have been slow (the "right hand turn" away from megahertz to power/performance), now that Moore's Law is over it's going to take actual architectural savvy to make significant improvements.
Maybe they can partner with Apple and make a really skinny macbook.
Nope. They've decided to hit 7nm and then call it a day.
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Are cpuburning tools going to become essential kit for hardware testing? Remember when hard drives used to fail regularly? Remember when RAM used to fail regularly? Those were the days.
Always has been, always will be.
GaAs was the future of super-fast transistors. The Cray 3 was made from GaAs.
GaAs has a much higher electron mobility than silicon, 8,5000 versus about 1,500 for silicon. This allows for much faster switching. InGaAs has an electron mobility of 10,000 allowing even faster switching.
But that's just electrons which are used in P channel MOSFETs. For CMOS, you also need N channel MOSFETS. The kicker is that GaAs and InGaAs have respectively lower and much lower hole mobility so the N channel FETs switch rather slower than silicon.
CMOS is by far the only architecture. Historically it is the most power efficient since it only spends energy switching. On high speed, small scale CMOS, however, lots of power goes into the switching itself, the switching is fast enough that the devices don't really act very ideally and there's a lot of leakage.
Perhaps at very extreme ends, other architectures can compete, power wise.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Graphene has shown great promise with doping as well.
Rember Mores Law simply states transistor count doubles every ~2 years.
Process size does not need to shrink. We have both 3d and larger dies as expansion options.
Once process shrink stalls expect increasedass production efficiency to allow stacked dies or larger dies. Anyone remember the size of the Pentium pro?
Welcome InGaAs Valley
InGaAs Valley has a nice ring to it too.
We are seeing the effects of Rare Earth Metal availability on hard disk production. Switching from silicon, the second most frequent element on Earth after oxygen, to comparatively scarce elements for important electronics is going to lead to new wars, trade wars, and the rise of oppressive regimes handed weapons in order to keep the political situation "stable" and force wage slaves to die in the mines.
will involve making chips taller, ie various forms of 3D ICs. That would mean that we could continue to get the apparent effects of higher densities at least for a while, though we'd really just be making taller or chips or better interconnected layers, but it would also mean that the cost of transistors wouldn't go down, it would probably go up.
I suspect EU environmental regulations will kill this.
None of those elements are exactly harmless and arsenic has a particularly bad rep. I mean they banned lead in solder and I'm fairly sure the toxicity of GaAs is going to work out fairly high.
With Si, it's easy to create a great gate insulator, just oxidize the silicon,
and you're done. With GaAs/InGaAs, there's still research going on how
to create a good gate inulator. A paper from 2012
(http://iopscience.iop.org/0268-1242/27/11/115002) proposes to use Al oxide,
which complicates things by adding another material and and an extra process
step to the manufacturing.
On a side note: in the paper, the GaAs gate length was 1.5 um. A bit more than 5 nm.
Seems like you took too long to type yipee there. Better luck next time. Try a few e's less maybe?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Diamond is the best semiconductor by quite a margin. This link: http://www.evincetechnology.com/whydiamond.html tells part of the story. Some diamond devices have run at 700 degC.
In the mean time, SiC is the next best thing.
AMD: herrrp deeerrrp
Intel: tick tock mother******
"The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs),"
Yeah and InGaAs puts out several orders of magnitude more heat than silicon, all other factors being equal. Do they plan on selling Fluorinert cooling kits to sell with those new chips? LOL!
> III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs
I think the french will like it and possibly the swedes. They use Gallium and Indium based semiconductors in airborne electronic warfare systems, which allows for very high RF energy output in physically very small and high temperature tolerant packages. (For example used in the Dassault Rafale and SAAB Gripen fighter jets). The french SPECTRE jamming suite is especially famous: the Rafale plane is not stealthy, only has reduced radar reflection, but the french trusted their system enough so their pilots were already flying deep in lybian airspace by the time the US Navy started to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles at Gaddhafi. Supposedly there is something equal or better in the american F-35 JSF, but that airframe is so buggy one must wonder if it will ever enter service?
On the other hand non-silicon semiconductors, like Ga and IN tend to cost twice the price of pure gold per weight or more. At the most extreme end, the soviet-russians even created diamond-based semiconductors, for use in space weapons and a planned Venus robotic rover. They invented a diamond crystal growing machine for the purpose, which after the Cold War was sold to a US company, which nowadays grows and sells multiple carat "cultured" yellow diamonds for ladyfolk decoration purposes. Beware, that femme fatale may wear a supercomputer on her finger! Now you know why multiple-finger gesture support was developed by Synaptics...
The process name has increasingly less to do with feature size, so whether the smallest features on the die are really 7nm? I sincerely doubt it.
Then there's that chipzilla does lead in fabrication processes, it leads in little else, but the price of fab plants means buying into the game to play is rather costly, keeping innovation out. So there is a rather large dark side to this: The price of newer processes is less innovation otherwise. Seeing what some dedicated groups manage with ages old hardware (say, the C64 demo scene), there's rather a lot we're leaving unexplored in this incessant race to the bottom of process.
The prices in my condo development in Indium Gallium Arsenide Valley is going to explode!
Chips that run hotter also have more thermal gradient, which can put mechanical stress on the various delicate layers of the chip. Being able to run hotter means you can support more of a thermal gradient to ambient, and thus support more heat flow and thus more computations/sec. However, at some point you're going to cause mechanical failure of the chip, especially if the stresses cycle.
So not only termperature tolerance, but also coefficient of thermal expansion and strength of all the various materials is going to count when it comes to longevity.
--PM
The cost of the raw materials is completely dwarfed by the cost of processing. Even a very large chip (2 cm x 2cm by .5mm thick) masses less than a gram. It's also likely that these high-performance III-V chips will be built on a cheaper substrate, meaning the thickness of the expensive stuff will be much, much smaller.
Phenomenal cosmic power!!! Itty bitty living space. Nothing like borking amazing hardware with a crappy, virus laden OS.
It's a bit more complicated that that. Even if an element is somewhat abundant but evenly distributed in the earth's crust, then it's difficult to mine. It's only practical to mine something if it's concentrated in some areas. E.g. gold is rare but you can find it in macroscopic flecks or clumps that are concentrated in certain areas. If gold were not concentrated like that but was instead uniformly distributed in the crust, there'd be no economical way to mine it.
That said, it looks like indium is concentrated somewhere: in zinc ores. So large scale production may be possible.
In the article, it says that Intel stated they will move from silicon at 7nm. The article's author speculated it would be InGaAs. Maybe it will be.
The end of silicon has been predicted for at least 20 years. It seems bound to happen someday, but with the multi-decade history of silicon outliving its death, we will need to see something real instead of speculation in an article.
Each new silicon node since the mid 90's at least brought new challenges. Each time, people said this was the last node where silicon makes sense. The thing is that the significant disadvantages of silicon have always been less than the disadvantages of all the other options so far except for niche applications. Like I said, someday this may change but until it actually happens I will be skeptical.
According to Wikipedia 0.075 ton/year is produced of monocrystalline silicon for use in integrated circuits.
That can't possibly be accurate. Here's a paper reporting that total consumption of fully-refined silicon for chip manufacture in 1988 was 750 metric tons. I don't think increasing process efficiencies would have reduced that figure by four orders of magnitude since then...
Uh, everyone uses III-V semiconductors. It's not just France and Sweden. For anything high frequency + high power, III-Vs are used. Just look at the power amplifier in your cell phone, as one of many examples.
There is some debate among people if 5nm will make sense or even be reasonable to do...... it might happen, but we're running out of room in the known universe.
Silicon Valley is in for a hard crash when Moore's law runs out. The big umbrella of tech companies which have grown up around silicon will fold up when the driver of that growth ends. In particular, it will become impossible to sustain a company the size of Apple at its current profit margins and growth rate without continued advances in silicon. Apple sees the writing on the wall and needs to diversify, hence its move into automobiles.
I remember reading about this back in the early 1990's... from what I recall of the article, it wasn't wholy practical at the time owing to the expense of fabrication compared to silicon with the technologies available, but the article writer did talk about the far faster switching speeds than what silicon can achieve... more than an order of magnitude, iirc.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The wheel gets reinvented. Again. The Cray-3 used Gallium Arsenide and 3D chip packaging i.e. chip stacking. You can see 3D chip stacking in use today in things like smartphones. The thing is the Cray-3 is from 1991.
At 7nm, we'll have computers easily 10x faster than today's 16nm fab we're shifting to.
16nm to 7nm we're halving each dimension so 2x2x2 increase in number of transistors in the same space, but going smaller transistors can decrease voltage and increase frequency, so 10x speedup easy.
Hopefully we'll have 8 core CPUs with 4GB of on CPU memory. Having CPU/GPU/RAM/pretty much the whole computer on the main chip = lower memory access timing plus other advantages.
Use that advantage wisely you lazy programmers, cause its your last opportunity to be lazy.
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