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- Breaking Down TSMC's Huge Microchip Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for the Semiconductor Industry
Breaking Down TSMC's Huge Microchip Breakthrough: A Game-Changer for the Semiconductor Industry
Discover the groundbreaking technology announced by TSMC that goes beyond 1nm, revolutionizing the semiconductor industry. Learn about the new materials and transistor architecture driving this innovation and the implications for the future of chip design and production.
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Video Transcript
modern life runs on semiconductors and TSMC is
arguably the most important fab in the world it
makes around 90% of the world's most advanced
chips now TSMC has announced a new technology
that will take us beyond 1nm as a chip designer
I can tell you this is a big deal for the entire
industry so in this video I will break down the
genius behind this new technology what is the
next big thing in semiconductors what's going
on with the TSMC stock price and why we will
rely less on ASML lithography machines in the
future when TSMC was starting out in 1987 their
first chip was manufactured in 3 micrometers
technology that's 3,000nm just think about it
and recently they announced that they are ramping
up the production of 1.6nm technology this means
that over the last 40 years or so they managed
to make their chips 99.99% smaller and the next
big breakthrough is just around the corner and
it involves new materials and a cutting-edge
transistor architecture CFET but to truly grasp
the beauty the genius behind this we must start
with transistors first if we go back up until
around 2012 the basis for all silicon chips was
so-called Planar transistor and we love Planar
transistor because this one is very easy to
understand it's just like a tiny electronic switch
which controls the flow of the current imagine a
pipe with water flowing through it if you place
a valve in the middle you can turn the water flow
on and off in a similar way transistor controls
the flow of electric current it has three main
parts source where electric current starts drain
where the current exits and gate which is used to
control the transistor when you apply voltage to
the gate it creates an electric field that either
opens or blocks the path between the source and
the drain so this Planar transistor remained the
state-of-the-art technology for about 50 years but
when we were approaching the 22nm process scaling
its dimensions further were no longer possible
what's interesting for a long time we were
reducing the gate length but further reduction
were causing the channel becoming too thin which
resulted in electron tunneling from the source to
the drain and that's bad imagine in the example
of the pipe imagine you close the valve but the
water is still leaking so basically we were not
able to control the transistor anymore and as
you will see today since then it has become all
about the gate the first step in this evolution
was to stretch the channel in a kind of Fin and
wrap the gate on three sides of it this new
architecture was called FinFET and this was a
very elegant solution because the gate wrapped
around the channel allowed for better control
it which means it could be faster switched on and
off quickly improving the speed of transistor and
allowing us to pack more of them per silicon area
these new transistors leaked less power when they
were switched off means devices can run longer
on a single charge in fact Intel was the first to
manufacture FinFET devices which hit the market in
2012 at the 22nm process node and one year later
TSMC also moved to FinFET devices in fact today
almost all high performance electronics including
Apple Silicon NVIDIA and AMD GPUs are manufactured
in FinFET technology now we are coming to the most
interesting part as of today the limits of FinFET
architecture has already been reached and now the
industry has to take yet another bold leap in
transistor architecture now we are entering
the truly 3D era of transistors and remember it's
all about the gate if you think about it the only
way to shrink the footprint further and get even
better control of the gate is to control it from
more sides here the genius is in turning the
channel on its side stacking horizontal nano
sheets instead of standing vertical Fins now
instead of growing horizontally the nano sheets
are multiplied vertically and this design allows
the gate to fully wrap around the channel so a
true gate-all-around structure eliminating leakage
and improving electrostatic control and good news
the first gate-all-around transistors are coming
in N2 technology is already entering the mass
production and first devices coming to iPhones
now let's talk tools even though gate-all-around
architecture was an evolutionary step from
FinFET where TSMC was a decade old leader still
many processes had to be readjusted and here the
general trend is that from now on EUV lithography
machines will be less on the critical path and
other tools and noble materials will become
more and more increasingly important EUV tools
essentially create a controlled tiny explosion
inside the machine and use the high energy emitted
photons to print the finest features on the wafer
and this process is beautiful it's often compared
to tiny star explosions because there is a similar
