Moore’s Law apparently encountered great challenges, or entered into a dilemma. Intel and TSMC, as their staunch supporters, are also thinking about ways to continue this law.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Semiconductor Industry Watch” ( ID: icbank), author Zhang Jiankeya.
When the integrated circuit was first invented, the feature size at that time was about 10 μm (10000 nm), and then gradually reduced to 5 μm, 3 μm, 1 μm, 0.8 μm, 0.5 μm, 0.35 μm, 0.25 μm, 0.18 μm, 0.13 μm. 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm, 16nm, 10nm, TSMC has started mass production of 7nm+ (7nm with EUV) chips, and will also mass produce 5nm next year. In this process, the process has undergone more than 20 generations of changes, and in the next few years, 3nm and 2nm chips will also be mass-produced. From 5μm to 5nm, a 1000-fold change has been achieved, which has been around for more than 40 years.
The cross-sectional diameter of human hair is about 80μm. For example, SRAM with 28nm process technology can put 20735 SRAM units on the cross section of hair. With the development of micro-shrinking technology, the diameter is 80μm. The cross section can accommodate more and more SRAM cells. This is mainly achieved by the lithography process and its technological evolution.
However, as the feature size continues to shrink, it has reached the limits of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and process technology. At present, the number of transistors in integrated circuits, as well as power consumption and performance, have been hardly the same as in the past 40 years. Smoothly showing a linear development trend (that is, according to Moore’s Law), and not only the process is more and more difficult, the cost is also high, and the manufacturers that can provide 10nm and more advanced process chip manufacturing only have TSMC, Samsung and Intel.
Among these three, the two companies that really lead the evolution of Moore’s Law are Intel and TSMC. These two companies have always been supporters of Moore’s Law. TSMC believes that semiconductor process technology can evolve according to Moore’s Law. To 0.1nm. Among the two strong, TSMC came to the fore, in the last five years or so, in the semiconductorThe manufacturing process has been pressing Intel. However, TSMC was founded in 1987, and Intel was founded in 1968, and Moore’s Law was proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of Intel’s founders.
Therefore, the true accompanying chip manufacturing and Moore’s Law from birth, to growth, and now to the slow progress, is Intel, through the company’s chip development process, and the evolution of process nodes and the increase in the number of transistors, There is an intuitive and systematic understanding of the development of semiconductor processes and Moore’s Law.
From the first commercial processor to the 10nm chip
In April 1965, “Electronics” magazine (Electronics Magazine) published an article by Gordon Moore (who was an engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor), “Making integrated circuits fill more components.” It is predicted that the number of transistors and resistors integrated on a semiconductor chip will double every year, which is the prototype of Moore’s Law.
In 1975, Moore presented a paper at the IEEE International Electronic Components Conference, which amended Moore’s Law according to the actual situation at the time, and changed “doubled every year” to “doubled every two years”. The popular saying is “double every 18 months.” But in September 1997, Moore stated in an interview that he never said “doubled every 18 months.”
In 1968, three years after Moore proposed the original version of Moore’s Law, he co-founded Intel Corporation with his friends. The company was originally based on design and production memory, and then gradually built its business based on application and market trends. The focus shifted to the processor.
In 1971, Intel released the world’s first commercial microprocessor, the 4004, which used a 10μm process, which enabled the integration of 2,250 transistors on the chip.
In 1979, the company introduced the processor 8086, which used a 3μm process technology to integrate 29,000 transistors on the chip, which is 10 times higher than the 10μm process. This is the first value of Moore’s Law evolution. reflect.
In 1982, Intel introduced the 80286, which used a 1.5μm process and had 134,000 transistors.
In 1985, the company introduced the famous 386 series processor, which increased the process node to 1μm, which increased the number of transistors to 275,000, which is nearly 10 times higher than 3μm.
In 1989, Intel introduced the 486 series of processors, which used a 0.8μm process, bringing the number of transistors to 1.2 million.
In 1993, the company introduced the first Pentium processor, using