Intel goes for immersion at 32nm
INTEL IS STARTING to talk about 32nm, and it is as it should be, with one big exception. While everyone focuses on the rather pedestrian bleeding edge headline, they missed the part about immersion.
The main thing that everyone seems to be interested in is that Intel made an announcement about 32nm chips. They scaled features linearly by .7x, so area goes down by about 50%. Transistor gate pitch is 112.5nm, the smallest reported to date for any 32nm technology.
They demoed this as early as September 2007 with a 291 Mb SRAM chip. It has a .171µm^2 cell size, and used more than 1.9 Billion transistors. To put that in perspective, it is almost one transistor for every $350 given to banks in the recent 'bailout'. Talk about big numbers....
The new transistors use a second generation high-K + metal gate structure, the first generation was on 45nm.
This means chips made on the process should have low power use and leakage will be far less of a problem than without. If you are thinking evolutionary, you would be right so far. The big bang was quite well hidden though. If you read the papers that they are going to present at IEDM, you will see that they have a special feature, immersion. The paper, "A 32nm Logic Technology Featuring Second Generation High-k + Metal Gate Transistors, Enhanced Channel Strain and 0.171um2 SRAM Cell Size in a 291Mb Array" has it in the abstract. It says, "193nm immersion lithography for critical patterning layers". That more than anything is the big bang from a technology point of view.
The next step is EUV for 22nm. We are not supposed to have figured that out yet, but since they are openly posting jobs for EUV mask makers at the 22nm node, we kind of put 2 and 2 together to get 22. Cymer says they will be there in time, so things are going to get interesting and quite expensive in 3 years time. µ
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When Intel actually delivers products to market, then we'll see if their claims are fact or typical marketing hype. One thing Intel is good at and that is copying AMD's success. Before you know it Intel will have an on-chip memory controller.
Read from Foundry person that use Big Concave Lens in Production, Thought about it, Why Not Very Small Concave Lens, so theres less aberation due to enormous glass?
Next: Why Not Polarized Light, to straitghten rays, you could spin filter to get most exact image.Maybe make lamp glass out of polarized material too.
Finally, in Litho theres process called Fluro, it uses super bright background material to increase sensitiveity to very small changes in contrast, used with UV filter. How about that emulsion sensitiveity? By time rays where spun, boosted & shrunk, maybe it'd hit .1 NM & Nothing Larger, then What Do You Do? Drashek
"One thing Intel is good at and that is copying AMD's success."
Success, let me check AMD's balance sheet there for ya..Oh oops, I haven't seen a positive sign in any of their ledger sheets...
Ok ok, money isn't anything...let me check the current performance results i've seen floating around the intertubes..oh wait..AMD isn't performing as well their either..thats peculiar..?
Well, AMD must be better at releasing products than Intel then... *cough cough* like Barecelona..oh wait a minute... :(
Through marketing...
Intel hasn't copied AMD. Ever. When AMD left Intel to make their own CPU's, they were not allowed to use the same technology. That includes the front side bus. That in itself forced the move to the onboard memory controller. When that expired recently, Intel was allowed to finally do such a thing.
AMD had a period of what...5 years of success (Athlon's run in 1999-2004) behind Intel's 40? Nothing's been copied. 64-bit and Dual Core weren't firsts for AMD, however they marketed it as it were...and ya'll bit on it; and continue to do so.
WHEN this is delivered to the market, it'll be another first.
As usual, the INQ is better at just cutting and pasting process tech blurbs and not analyzing them. Even Intel commented that EUV at 22nm will likely not be ready.
Expect double exposure immersion litho to extend to 22nm as EUV will not be ready in time. If you recall most folks thought immersion HAD to be used on 45nm.
Immersion is an alternate way to print features on a wafer. A chip with features printed via immersion litho does not run any faster than wafers with conventional litho (provided features are the same size). While this is an important technology to extend feature size scaling, it is perhaps a bit overhyped (thanks in part to IBM/AMD overhyping it at 45nm)
Yes, but, type of bumps are they going to use?
- good bumps or bad bumps?!
- High Lead, or Low Lead
- we need to know!
immersion lithography is nothing much new and has been used with 45nm processes before.
Why is this then a big deal?
Hmm, I used some of these keywords to find out if any rummors supported the view of 22nm in 2013. Let's see:
March 3rd, 2008
"We [Intel] are going to 450mm wafer at the 22nm node you know. "
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/881/1044881/intel-450-sheepdog
May 16, 2008
"THE BIG CHIP FIRMS are readying themselves for the transition to bigger 450 mm wafers by 2012, with Intel, TSMC and Samsung Electronics"
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/771/1035771/450mm-wafer-coming-2012
Dec 10th, 2008
"The next step is EUV for 22nm. We are not supposed to have figured that out yet, but since they are openly posting jobs for EUV mask makers at the 22nm node, we kind of put 2 and 2 together to get 22."
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/961/1049961/intel-goes-for-immersion-at-32nm
Charlie what he wrote implied that it 22nm chips be out in 2013 or late 2012. But given what you said, it seems that is the case. And more. Given that intel is more or less in syncrony with TSMC for 32nm and below, we are led to conclude that they will have a half 28 nm node chips by mid-end 2011.
Intel and other companies have ways to not use EUV or new lithography to go to 22 nm and beyond. Intel's projection is 80 nm gate pitch at 22 nm (2011) and 60 nm gate pitch at 16 nm (2013). The latter is comparable to today's most aggressive NAND Flash. So the double patterning will be extended to these nodes. For 11 nm, leakage under the gates would be a prohibitive issue.
Intel used to sit back and develop products slowly, charge a lot of money for them, and screw us all. Until they had some competition.
Competition means that AMD and Intel have to produce better products for us, lower their prices and give us more product for our money.
The new AMD cpu's are doing well in some of the tech science benchmarks, just not as well in the consumer gaming benchmarks.
AMD's new cpu is kicking Intel in Virtualisation. In fact AMD is expected to keep at least 30% of the server market share. If Virutalisation grows then AMD should grow with it, this extra cash should mean some more good products.
I think a low cost AMD cpu, low cost ATI gpu, all inside a 10" mini-laptop, that can play games at 800x600 at 30-40fps would be nice. A cheap gaming laptop, excellent.
The Inquirer - Please post a news item saying when you're going to fix comment Paragraphs! ;-)