![]() ![]() Everything needs to be reinvented, the tools, the techniques, the lot. You can't take an old design and slap it in, not at the complete design level, not at the functional block level, not at the transistor level. Each different design needs a lot of work to get from circuit to chip. TSMC's N7 is as far from those halcyon days as you can get. That it could work at all was amazing, that it could do good yields? Unbelievable. TSMC's N7 was the pinnacle of that process, an amazing, tottering pile of near-magic photon-wrangling audacity, a melange of multiple overlapping mask exposures and complex production tricks. In its absence, enormous amounts of ingenuity was poured into perverting the laws of physics as far as they could go. It ended up arriving 20 years late, throwing grit into the vaseline for everyone. EUV was much harder than anyone expected. The industry waited to move to EUV and its instant 14x leap in tinyness.Īnd it continued to wait. But that's OK, boffins reasoned, they would just move to a smaller wavelength. Electromagnetic theory suggested it wasn't practical to make things on a chip that was smaller than the wavelength of light used to make them. But as the 2000s approached and with them the transition from 130nm to 65nm process chips, the fundamental problem with DUV became more pressing. For many years, it was not a limiting factor in the ever-shrinking chip geometries that powered the heyday of Moore's Law. ![]() Maybe EUV underestimated how hard this is.ĭUV lithography is old, dating back to the 1980s. So, instead, N7 uses the previous generation 193nm Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) process – a breathtaking achievement, but deeply consequential. There are lots of interesting things about TSMC's N7 node, the most important being that it doesn't use the 13.5nm wavelength Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography process to print the patterns on wafers that make them into circuits.ĮUV litho is both state of the art and embargoed by the West – the US successfully pressured the Netherlands government to block ASML - the only provider of EUV lithography machines - from selling them to China. ![]()
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