[HN Gopher] 1nm Breakthrough: TSMC, MIT and NTU Published on Nature
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1nm Breakthrough: TSMC, MIT and NTU Published on Nature
Author : whitneyfus
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-05-28 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buzzorange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buzzorange.com)
| trhway wrote:
| i don't believe in physical limits for computation since
| beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental
| impossible to surpass limit and few years later i had DX4-133
| running at home. Saying that with high appreciation for the grit
| of the people in the industry who has taken us that far and going
| to take even farther.
| zsmi wrote:
| > beginning of 90ties when i read about 50MHz being the
| fundamental impossible to surpass limit
|
| Do you remember what magazine that was in?
|
| It's hard to imagine anyone thinking 50MHz was a fundamental
| limit to circuit design, or computers, in the 90s. I am very
| curious what their argument was.
|
| The Cray-1 ran 80MHz in the 70s.
| http://www.openloop.com/education/classes/sjsu_engr/engr_com...
|
| FM is faster than that and it's been around a long time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band
| trhway wrote:
| it was in USSR, so there would have been natural delay in the
| stuff getting printed there, and also it may have been end of
| 80-ties. My point here isn't about specific numbers and
| dates, it is that relatively short period between me reading
| about the limit and experiencing it getting broken left me
| with big doubts about the limits, and made me thinking about
| them more as the limits of our world view and less as real
| physical limits. Similar like "c" happens to be a speed limit
| only in the fixed spacetime.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to
| surpass limit
|
| Where did you read that? As a working EE through the 80s and
| until today, I never heard that claimed. Maybe someone,
| somewhere wrote that, but it would have been an extremely
| fringe opinion. Even at the time I think most people would have
| received that opinion as a crock of shit.
| sigstoat wrote:
| > i don't believe in physical limits for computation
|
| there are limits, we're just not close to them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
|
| > when i read about 50MHz being the fundamental impossible to
| surpass limit
|
| yeah i think the problem here is popular press writing
| trhway wrote:
| some of those limits are applicable to black holes only in
| the state of thermodynamic equilibrium. The miniature
| unstable black holes/singularities produced using quark-gluon
| lithography may be not a subject to those limits, and
| miniature wormhole loops through 4th dimension may prove to
| be an effective workaround for storage limits, etc.
| sigstoat wrote:
| i hope that any of that has any bearing on engineering
| practice in our lifetimes.
| comboy wrote:
| If you have some good points to disprove Heisenberg's rule
| then it's worth publishing a paper.
|
| If you are talking about quark litography (which does not
| physically make any sense as af as I can tell), then you
| are still agreeing with the parent comment, there are
| limits but we still have a long way.
| [deleted]
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Challenging to read things that are auto-translated from Chinese
| into English.
|
| From what I gather from the article, didn't get the Nature paper
| yet, the novelty here is a bismuth deposition process that
| doesn't damage fine structures underneath it.
|
| This is definitely one of the hard problems in semiconductor
| manufacturing and as stated, it is implied it allows for very
| fine lines (1 nm) for connecting elements on a chip. If they can
| do that in a commercial fab it would help with density, if they
| are really able to reduce connection resistance to "negligible
| amounts" then that would be really good for power dissipation.
| comboy wrote:
| Poor IBM.
|
| It's as if we had only one efficient oil well for the whole
| world. It's getting a bit hot.
| ckemere wrote:
| Abstract: Advanced beyond-silicon electronic technology requires
| both channel materials and also ultralow-resistance contacts to
| be discovered1,2. Atomically thin two-dimensional semiconductors
| have great potential for realizing high-performance electronic
| devices1,3. However, owing to metal-induced gap states
| (MIGS)4,5,6,7, energy barriers at the metal-semiconductor
| interface--which fundamentally lead to high contact resistance
| and poor current-delivery capability--have constrained the
| improvement of two-dimensional semiconductor transistors so
| far2,8,9. Here we report ohmic contact between semimetallic
| bismuth and semiconducting monolayer transition metal
| dichalcogenides (TMDs) where the MIGS are sufficiently suppressed
| and degenerate states in the TMD are spontaneously formed in
| contact with bismuth. Through this approach, we achieve zero
| Schottky barrier height, a contact resistance of 123 ohm
| micrometres and an on-state current density of 1,135 microamps
| per micrometre on monolayer MoS2; these two values are, to the
| best of our knowledge, the lowest and highest yet recorded,
| respectively. We also demonstrate that excellent ohmic contacts
| can be formed on various monolayer semiconductors, including
| MoS2, WS2 and WSe2. Our reported contact resistances are a
| substantial improvement for two-dimensional semiconductors, and
| approach the quantum limit. This technology unveils the potential
| of high-performance monolayer transistors that are on par with
| state-of-the-art three-dimensional semiconductors, enabling
| further device downscaling and extending Moore's law.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| That "1nm" is complete marketing bullshit, like it always was,
| for a decade or two.
|
| Silicon lattice step is ~0.5nm, so 1nm is at most 3 atoms.
| Current technology is definitely not there yet however we're
| getting closer. Very interested what marketing department will
| say after 1nm became old news
| Empf wrote:
| In a LSD trip someone could wonder if our simulation has no
| idea what the next evolutionary step is.
|
| Similar how music did not change much in the last 20 years
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| >Very interested what marketing department will say after 1nm
| became old news
|
| 0.8nm. Something TSMC stated they intend to bring to market by
| 2030.
|
| Yes it is marketing term. But I thought everyone should know
| that by now.
| [deleted]
| nomel wrote:
| I'm curious if two gens from now we'll see -1nm or 250pm.
| CalChris wrote:
| The term "5 nanometer" has no relation to any actual physical
| feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the
| transistors. It is a commercial or marketing term used by the
| chip fabrication industry to refer to a new, improved
| generation of silicon semiconductor chips in terms of increased
| transistor density, increased speed and reduced power
| consumption.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process
|
| It is an industry standard term for describing a process node
| which is quite different from marketing bullshit.
| threatofrain wrote:
| IMO GiB is a deliberately consumer-confusing term with an
| even clearer standard definition.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Same with 4K, prior to it the number was used to describe
| the height of the screen (480, 720, 1080) but then 4K
| describes the width which confuses people into thinking it
| has 4x the resolution of 1080 when it's really 2160 (double
| the resolution.)
| chrischen wrote:
| HD ~= 1080p ~= 1K. 4 x 1080p ~= 4K.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| Double the linear resolution. 4x the pixels.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| The challenge there was combining code systems. 4K as a
| standard had been used for a relatively long time in
| digital cinema and editing, and I believe the long-
| dimension standard was chosen based on telecine processes
| for scanning film for digital editing and effects.
| Consumer tech wasn't anywhere near those sorts of
| resolutions for a very long time, and the 480/720/1080
| definition was based on TV broadcasts displayed with CRT
| scanlines. Then consumer display density rose to the
| point that it became relevant, and 4K was the preexisting
| professional name for digital displays in that
| resolution. It's complicated, but I don't think the
| choice was intended to confuse.
| [deleted]
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Both powers of 1000 and 1024 are common in computing
| depending on the context (no it is not just a hard drive
| thing), and so it is only reasonable that the non-SI
| quantities get their own prefix to distinguish them from
| the SI quantities.
| OJFord wrote:
| It's industry standard to blame anything viewed with disdain
| on the marketing department, if EEVBlog is anything to go by!
| ('Product/industrial designers' when it's the same sort of
| thing but he likes it.)
| nomel wrote:
| It's a random number in front of physical measurement,
| unrelated to anything from reality.
|
| Just because all of the marketing departments choose to
| participate in this particular bs doesn't mean it's not pure
| marketing bs. That just means it's industry standard
| marketing bs.
| CalChris wrote:
| No, it isn't random either but it hasn't been associated
| with a particular physical feature since 1997.
|
| _How Are Process Nodes Defined?_
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/296154-how-are-
| process...
| alokv28 wrote:
| Labels for production nodes (e.g. "1nm") have diverged from
| specific physical distances (e.g. gate width) for years now.
| ckemere wrote:
| I'm confused - the whole point of this paper appears to be
| reporting a gate composed of a 2D monolayer of atoms as opposed
| to a 3D bulk deposition. So it seems like it is "there" in the
| sense you mean?
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