Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
So one of the things that has helped Moore’s law keep law-ing was the constant enshrinkination of transistors. This has been measured in nanometers, or, in American, units that are 1 / 25,400,000 inch. The positive effects are immediate: smaller transistors work faster, can be installed more densely, and require less power to operate. Among other companies, Samsung has been working on a 3nm process, but they have consistently pushed out the delivery date as building things that small, reliably, is hard.
It looks like Samsung is still under 50% in reliability of produced chips, which is way below something that could be considered financially viable. Other companies that use a different way to build things at that tiny scale, such as TSMC, are also struggling to make reliable product at 3nm. Intel has a 3nm process on their timeline, but not until 2024/5.
One of the biggest problems with manufacturing at this scale is the fact that it introduces quantum-tunneling problems, which I won’t get into in detail, but suffice it to say… is bad.
Hilariously, all three of these companies have both 2 and 1nm processes on the roadmap for the end of the decade, which is a target that seems increasingly unlikely. Research is still ongoing, but it could be that 3nm is the smallest we can get without completely revolutionizing the way these transistors are designed and built.