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
Not a lot of explanations here that a 5 year old would understand, here’s mine.
Imagine trying to draw a very detailed house blueprint with a very fat marker – the lines would be too thick and would all blur together, and the blueprint would be unreadable. You need a pencil with a sharp point. A 90nm chip fab uses a “90 nm marker” to draw the parts of the chip, and if you tried to draw 3nm parts, the lines would all overlap and it wouldn’t work.
Making the “marker/pencil” sharper is technically very challenging – no matter how much you sharpen the pencil, it won’t make lines thinner than, say, a hair, so if you want to go smaller you need a whole different way of drawing lines in the first place. Each new generation of fabrication technology is like a new, sharper kind of pencil, and we’ve got that pencil so sharp that we’re hitting the limits of what’s physically possible.
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