TSMC to make advanced 3nm chips in Japan

Comments

• craigers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Just a reminder for anyone that thinks 3nm chips means the transistors themselves are only 3nm, they are bigger than that. 3nm is the marketing name for the fab process they are using.

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  • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Close, except it’s not a marketing term. It’s part of a published IEEE standard.

    From Wikipedia:

    The term “3 nanometer” has no direct relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch, or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers, and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.[12]

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    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      So, the IEEE has an actual norm for marketing speak.
      Which, honestly, ought to happen more often.

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    • craigers@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      And the number keeps going down because… That’s good marketing. IEEE rebranded 802.11ax as wifi 6 because… Marketing. They can do it too.

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    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If I’m not entirely mistaken there is still some basis to the nanometre number, it just doesn’t refer to the actual smallest feature size or gate pitch anymore. Basically in the mid-2000 Dennard scaling stopped working and ever since the nanometre numbers are “made up”. Dennard scaling was how most progress was made by just shrinking transistors. But that doesn’t mean just because Dennard scaling doesn’t work anymore there is no progress, it’s just harder to achieve. So the semiconductor manufacturers just continued naming their fabrication methods as if Dennard scaling still worked.

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• xodasu@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  About time someone put serious money into advanced fabs outside Taiwan, this is a smart play by TSMC to chase AI demand and hedge geopolitical risk. 3nm in Kumamoto is a big vote of confidence for Japan and a signal that the industry sees AI chips as where the margins are.

  That said, don’t expect a flood of 3nm product overnight. Ramping 3nm in a brand new fab is brutally hard, yields take months if not years, and skilled fab workers and equipment are not plug-and-play. Bumping the budget to $17B and promising late 2027 is fine on paper, but the real work is the grind of volume ramp and supply chain readiness.

  Also meh about the cheerleading from politicians. Sure, public support matters, but taxpayers deserve transparency on what they’re subsidizing. Overall I’m cautiously optimistic, but staying realistic: this helps diversify capacity, but it’s neither cheap nor quick.

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  • bigmamoth@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    why this dude got banned lmao ?

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• yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I mean, when LLMs go out of style, at least we’ll have a bunch of cheap gpus and components to buy when it inevitably floods the used market after the current generation get superseded, coupled with multiple chip fabs going online, it will eventually be raining chips.

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  • zebidiah@lemmy.ca ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Image

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• gens@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I thought fabs are bad agains earthquakes

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  • photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They are. But Taiwan is prone to earthquakes as well and seem to handle them fine

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    • errer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Those fabs in Taiwan, even though they look like plain boxes from the outside, are really a wonder of human ingenuity. Each machine that’s sensitive to quakes is on a vibration isolation pedestal and that pedestal is seismically braced, from what I’ve read.

      Not to mention every building in Taiwan is laced with explosives in case China ever attacks…

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  • WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    This one will be designed to work during earthquake. Meaning that it won’t work without earthquakes

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  • xep@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Is there anything that’s good against earthquakes?

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    • webpack@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      flying type pokemon

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    • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      James Bond’s martini.

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    • TammyTobacco@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Godzilla?

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    • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Living in the sky

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    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      There is no vaccine.

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  • masta_chief@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There was a good LTT where he toured a new fab facility in Japan. Entire building(s) basically on giant shocks. It’s kind of mind blowing

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• TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  How come another East Asian country? Why does literally no other country want to make microchips?

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  • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Oh they want to… There are quite a few chip fabs around the world… there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.

    Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.

    And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

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    • jaxxed@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t understand why there aren’t more EU fabs, as the EUV machines are made there.

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  • chaogomu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Another factor here is that to make the most advanced chips, you need something called eleven 9 silicon. That’s silicon that’s 99.999999999% pure.

    We can only artificially manufacture up to nine 9 silicon.

    Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.

    That’s why the US gets to say who can even attempt to manufacture advanced chips.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.

      What

      Silicon wafer production just started with metallurgical grade quartzite and then chemically processed into high purity. The input material is usually around 98% purity.

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    • Eheran@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Drugs are bad mkay?

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