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
That’s just how technological progress works in general. Each new innovation is based off of loads of things that have also been innovated from the last iteration. To give you an extreme example, a similar question to yours would be “Why didn’t we get electric vehicles after horses and carriages and instead we had to go through steam power, then fossil fuels”.
“Shrinking” a cpu relies on very high precision equipment. At the moment a cpu is made at a certain scale, that’s the highest precision the existing tooling allows. And retooling is also insanely expensive in the chip making industry.
However, for some years now the size designation has no longer been reflective of the actual size: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process
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