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TSMC looks to double down on U.S. chip factories as talks in Europe falter

(www.reuters.com)
437 points adventured | 5 comments | 15 May 21 00:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.844s | source
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mjgs ◴[15 May 21 06:19 UTC] No.27162893[source]▶
I wonder how significant it is that there is all this worldwide expansion of chip making factories just as we get to 3nm architectures, I say that because there aren’t very many nm’s left, what happens when we get to zero?
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1. exporectomy ◴[15 May 21 06:28 UTC] No.27162934[source]▶
We already ran out of microns in the 1990's.
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2. LatteLazy ◴[15 May 21 07:44 UTC] No.27163275[source]▶
Silicon atoms are only 0.235nm apart. So at 1nm you only have 5 atoms left. At 0.2nm you have one atom lleft and it stops behaving like a semiconductor. So there are real physical limits to nm scale devices that don't apply to micron sized ones.

Admittedly were not as close to those limits as it seems since "nm" quoted on CPUs etc is no longer a literal size of the object. But we're getting there...

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3. mjgs ◴[15 May 21 11:12 UTC] No.27164202[source]▶
lol
4. mjgs ◴[15 May 21 11:13 UTC] No.27164205[source]▶
So we got 5 atoms left? Shit that’s not a lot is it.
5. imtringued ◴[15 May 21 13:08 UTC] No.27164857[source]▶
>Admittedly were not as close to those limits as it seems since "nm" quoted on CPUs etc is no longer a literal size of the object. But we're getting there...

nm process numbers are based on the theoretical feature size that a planar transistor process would need to be equivalent to the used process. Since this number is purely theoretical the lower bound is zero, it can go well below the plank length.