TSMC 3nm Production Slated for 2022

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Not to be outdone by anyone but themselves TSMC continues to roll out announcements this week. Just yesterday T.M. reported on how AMD’s Zen 4 using TSMC’s 5nm node is in full swing for 2021 release. Today Digitimes has reported, that according to senior vice president for fab operations, JK Wang, their 3nm node will begin production in 2022.

Towards the end of the summer Godfrey Cheng, head of TSMC’s global marketing, published a blog about how Moore’s Law is not dead. See more(pun intended) about that here. It would seem that they fully intend to commit to seeing their progress unimpeded by anything as they move from 7nm, to 5nm, and now 3nm productions. Also it should be no big surprise that they're now reported as being the biggest publicly traded company in Asia.

 

[JosiahBradley]

Can't wait for negative nm transistors! But seriously how much lower can we go?

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Can't wait for negative nm transistors! But seriously how much lower can we go?

Been making the same joke in my head for awhile now.

 

[Brian_B]

Well I guess you hit the size of a single electron at some point.... but before you get there, your making the traces out of elements, so the size of a single atom of whatever element that happens to be: a silicon atom is 0.2nm, but I don't know that the actual traces are that element. Other elements in a wafer tend to be larger than silicon (germanium, copper, etc).

I think we are already too small for light (at least with respect to traditional fiber-optics style -- might be able to do something with single photons yet).

 

[AntiQuark]

New material will be needed soon, although 3D stacking will be a big thing once they can cool it.
After that parallelism all the way (ie more cores only).