Are 28nm Transistors the Cheapest...Forever?

By SemiWiki

September 19, 2013

It is beginning to look as if 28nm transistors, which are the cheapest per million gates compared to any earlier process such as 45nm, may also be the cheapest per million gates compared to any later process such as 20nm.

What we know so far: FinFET seems to be difficult technology because of the 3D structure and so the novel manufacturing required but seems to be stable once mastered. Intel ramped it at 22nm and TSMC says they are on-track to have it at 16nm. What Intel doesn't have at 22nm is double patterning, and TSMC does at 20nm. It seems to have severe variability problems even when mastered. TSMC have not yet ramped 20nm to HVM so there is still an aspect of wait-and-see there.

The cheap form of double patterning is non-self-aligned, meaning that the alignment of the two patterns on a layer is entirely up to the stepper repeatability which is of the order of 4nm apparently. Of course this means that there is huge variation in any sidewall effects (such as sidewall capacitance) since the distance between the "plates" of the capacitor may vary by up to 4nm. This is variability that is very hard to remove (the stepper people of course are trying to tighten up repeatability, of course, which will be needed in any case for later processes). Instead EDA tools need to analyze it and designers have to live with it, but the margins to live with are getting vanishingly small.

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