Apple Silicon Likely to Benefit as TSMC Aims to Launch 2nm Chips by 2025

Fractions or they start spinning angstroms. There's always a smaller measure to adopt to support a marketing message. And don't let the laws of physics get in the way either. By super-fine hair-splitting, it can sound like whole number generations year over year while actually being only a fraction of what used to be a single generational number.

For example, if we put this in money terms, you would think a penny is as low as money goes. And yet, every gas station you pass adds the charge of 9/10ths of one cent... implying that someone else might bid that down to 8/10ths, 7/10ths, etc. But what if it gets down to 1/10th... then what??? Hello .0099, .0098, .0097, etc. That should buy a hundred years of generational gain claims.

There's always a smaller measure. And even when physics throws up a hard barrier, the fine hair that remains to max- er MIN- out the possibilities could be split into thousanths, ten thousandths, etc. The whole number will sound as familiar as whole numbers in nanometers now even if it is working within the fractional limits of only a single nanometer.

Besides, as others post often, even the current X nanometer process isn't literal. It's just a marketing "puffery" claim, apparently driven by the perceived need of a lower number in spite of the technology not actually representing the claim.

Funny how they call it 2nm while the transistor size or the absolute distance between the transistors is no where near 2 nanometers.

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I have great great respect for the engineers designing these chips. Very impressive engineering feat.

What happens when they hit 1nm? Is it possible to go even smaller?

We start all over again with Ångström, where 1 nm = 10 Å. The big question is how far physics will let us go. Molecular bonds are typically 1-2 Å in length so we can’t go smaller than that with ordinary matter.

I’m British but why aren’t these machines made in the USA? The USA invented all of this in the first place - Silicon Valley, the clue is in the name of course.

Given the huge strategic importance of semiconductors to the modern world, why has a US company become critically dependent on suppliers outside of the USA?

Sadly in a world where Ukraine has happened we can’t be sure that seamless international trade is a given.

I’m not trying to rub anyone’s nose in it, I’m just genuinely curious - and I do realise that I’m going off topic.

Intel has fabs in USA but could not keep up with the nm race. Taiwan and South Korea have simply become very skilled to make state of the art chips. Cost is also an issue.

You raise a good point though and EU are already begun discussions about chip fabs on the European continent to ensure chips enough to feed the EU based industries. They already started before the Ukraine war due to chip shortage. Similarly, EU will ensure internal production of medicine, vaccines and other critical medical goods to not be too dependent on others in a pandemic. Despite UK living EU, I hope we will have a nice collaboration on critical products across the channel.

Funny how they call it 2nm while the transistor size or the absolute distance between the transistors is no where near 2 nanometers.

It would be a really interesting story to find out why cutting edge tech like this isn’t being produced in the USA but in Taiwan.

Why did companies in the USA seemingly drop the ball in not being able to offer this technology?

The machines TSMC uses come from ASML in Europe.