However, if we don't take density or economics into account, Moore’s Law generally remains on track with doubled transistor counts every two years - Apple’s M1 Ultra with 114 billion transistors even exceeds that watermark. Additionally, single-threaded performance gains are slowing from the heady days of 50% yearly gains in the late 90s and early 2000s to ~5% per year. In fact, as shown above, chip design costs are skyrocketing due to more complex design rules and longer design cycle times, contributing to increased cost-per-transistor. Imec is fully convinced that Moore’s Law is still alive and well 52 years after it was penned, though we think that doesn't apply to the economic component of the law that also defined a lower cost per transistor over time. The industry faces increasing challenges as nodes progress, costs skyrocket, and the demand for more computing power, particularly for machine learning, increases non-linearly. Let's take a closer look at the roadmap and some of the complementary tech behind it. In fact, many of those products wouldn’t even be possible without the collaborative work undertaken years in advance at imec. However, that requires R&D efforts that can begin a decade before deployment, meaning that imec’s roadmaps can give us a much longer view of the upcoming advances in the semiconductor industry than the nearer-term product roadmaps from companies like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. The company is also famous for helping pioneer EUV technology in concert with its long-time partner ASML.Īt the end of the day, all of the leading-edge chipmakers use much of the same equipment sourced from a few critical toolmakers, so some level of standardization is necessary. Imec also partners with customers, like Intel or TSMC, among many others, for R&D on new technologies they can use in their latest processors. This collaboration allows the companies to work together to define the next generation of tools and software they will use to design and manufacture the chips that power the world.Ī standardized approach is becoming increasingly important in the face of the profoundly increasing complexity and cost of designing the chips, and the tools that make them. While the semiconductor research-focused imec doesn’t operate with much fanfare, it serves as the quiet cornerstone of the semiconductor industry, bringing fierce rivals like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung together with chip toolmakers such as ASML and Applied Materials, not to mention the equally-critical semiconductor software design companies (EDA) like Cadence and Synopsys, in a non-competitive environment. Think of imec as a silicon Switzerland, of sorts. You might not have heard of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (imec) before, but it ranks among the most important companies in the world, alongside better-known companies like TSMC and EUV-toolmaker ASML.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |