lucky for Singapore, while very limited in land area, they got all the high-paying technology companies there. I guess their development are very critical to compete against neighboring Asean countries.
"Overall, this marks the next step in an important turnaround for the contract fab, which was spun-off from AMD almost 13 years ago." Though I think that this specific expansion has more to do with the ashes of Chartered Semiconductor than AMD.
Still have a working 90nm Sempron machine with a massive 2 GB of DDR1 400. Cheap ECS board.
90nm certainly isn’t very exciting. 32nm is very old. 90nm is very ancient.
At some point it seems like a waste of silicon to use such large processes. I would have thought 28nm ‘bulk’ would be cheap enough by now to mostly relegate larger lithography to the EOL bracket. 40nm I can see, though. 90nm seems rather sad.
Perhaps it’s the design rules complexity (which increases with shrinkage according to a TSMC tech) that holds that back, not just higher equipment cost. Or, is equipment availability the biggest problem in terms of more recent but hardly cutting-edge stuff? My questions were probably answered in articles here that I missed. I know people will say that the ancient nodes are good enough for this and that but surely 28nm would be both good enough and require less silicon per chip.
So, clearly the cost of silicon wafers is a small component. Wafer-scale for the masses then. : ) Let’s use old nodes to bring the price way down for a wafer-scale GPU.
At least three factors account for the continued use of older nodes: 1. Legacy products - It's much cheaper and more reliable to continue to use an existing design, especially one that already has a long history than to spin and requalify a new design. This is especially true for Automotive applications, where reliability is more important than performance.
2. Design costs - As you mentioned, design costs increase at smaller nodes. Thus, for a low-volume product, the design costs can dominate and restrict you to an older node.
3. Device integration (eg. Analog, RF, PA's or other non-logic devices) - many non-logic device types do not really scale, so if a design has a lot of these non-scaling devices you don't see much benefit scaling the logic portion to a smaller and thus more expensive node.
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Fulljack - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
lucky for Singapore, while very limited in land area, they got all the high-paying technology companies there. I guess their development are very critical to compete against neighboring Asean countries.milli - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
"Overall, this marks the next step in an important turnaround for the contract fab, which was spun-off from AMD almost 13 years ago."Though I think that this specific expansion has more to do with the ashes of Chartered Semiconductor than AMD.
Yojimbo - Tuesday, June 22, 2021 - link
Aren't the ashes of AMD going completely cold since they stopped development of leading edge semiconductor nodes?Oxford Guy - Friday, June 25, 2021 - link
Still have a working 90nm Sempron machine with a massive 2 GB of DDR1 400. Cheap ECS board.90nm certainly isn’t very exciting. 32nm is very old. 90nm is very ancient.
At some point it seems like a waste of silicon to use such large processes. I would have thought 28nm ‘bulk’ would be cheap enough by now to mostly relegate larger lithography to the EOL bracket. 40nm I can see, though. 90nm seems rather sad.
Perhaps it’s the design rules complexity (which increases with shrinkage according to a TSMC tech) that holds that back, not just higher equipment cost. Or, is equipment availability the biggest problem in terms of more recent but hardly cutting-edge stuff? My questions were probably answered in articles here that I missed. I know people will say that the ancient nodes are good enough for this and that but surely 28nm would be both good enough and require less silicon per chip.
So, clearly the cost of silicon wafers is a small component. Wafer-scale for the masses then. : ) Let’s use old nodes to bring the price way down for a wafer-scale GPU.
SemiChemE - Sunday, July 11, 2021 - link
At least three factors account for the continued use of older nodes:1. Legacy products - It's much cheaper and more reliable to continue to use an existing design, especially one that already has a long history than to spin and requalify a new design. This is especially true for Automotive applications, where reliability is more important than performance.
2. Design costs - As you mentioned, design costs increase at smaller nodes. Thus, for a low-volume product, the design costs can dominate and restrict you to an older node.
3. Device integration (eg. Analog, RF, PA's or other non-logic devices) - many non-logic device types do not really scale, so if a design has a lot of these non-scaling devices you don't see much benefit scaling the logic portion to a smaller and thus more expensive node.