why do die shrinks in computer occur in increments & not huge jumps?

Question

For example i notice that the latest chips are 3 nm & below, & over the last decade i’ve seen it shrink little by little. What is it about this process that more money needs to be poured into each die shrink, & why couldn’t we just jump from 90nm to 3nm instead pf 65nm etc etc?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

I’m not familiar at all with the marketing stuff and only passingly familiar with the manufacturing part.

You can conceptualize the idea from a ton of different disciplines, though.

Consider someone wanted to make the world’s smallest car that performs identically or better than a normal car. Ignore all the nerd physics stuff like wind resistance, this is a 9th grade class where nothing matters unless I say so.

Starting with a normal car of today, you would start to come up with ideas about designs that are more compact.

It’s not long before you find the best layout and the car can’t get any smaller. You need that space for the engine. You put your best guys on it and they find a way to make an engine 5% smaller, so, you put in some effort and your car is now even smaller!

But, once people saw your new engine, they realized that the design could be generalized, so now you have a smaller battery, transmission, and someone came up with an even smaller engine. Put it all together and now your car is way smaller than it was before, but each part only made it a little smaller along the way.

Nothing technically would have stopped you from saying you wanted the smallest car and then doing it all at once, but it’s profitable to release things along the way and the market is REALLY good about pushing innovation. Maybe it would have taken you 10 years, but everybody together got it done in 3 because they were all competing with and learning from each other. This is one of the things that people who champion diversity like to point to: different perspectives can be HUGE for innovation.

Tldr: There was no point in time where people didn’t want any processors, so they are released continuously with small improvements rather than infrequently with larger improvements.