Reply to post: Re: That is small

Hitting 3 nanometers to cost chipmaker TSMC at least US$20 billion

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: That is small

That's been true for a long time, but node names still have meaning as far as density since each full node iteration is roughly double the density of the previous one. If you merely think of them as a placeholder for representing transistor density it is still useful even if the number no longer represents a physical gate dimension.

New generation logic processes from Intel, TSMC, etc. don't quite double density for real chips but that's not due to cheating on transistor size, rather the ever more restrictive design rules they're forced to use with high NA sources and SADP. For memory fabs utilizing simple patterns like NAND, each full node step still truly doubles the bits per mm^2.

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