Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

By the way, talking about unlikely things, forget about graphene, the future of semiconductors is bismuth!

Return of the gigahertz wars: New Chinese transistor uses bismuth instead of silicon to potentially sock it to Intel and TSMC with 40% more speed
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/processors/return-of-the-gigahertz-wars-new-chinese-transistor-uses-bismuth-instead-of-silicon-to-potentially-sock-it-to-intel-and-tsmc-with-40-percent-more-speed/
Silicon has dominated the chip industry as its foundational material since, well, forever. But now researchers at Peking University claim to have cooked up a novel approach to integrating transistors using, yup, you didn't guess it, bismuth. The result (via Interesting Engineering) is said to be 40% more speed in return for a 10% lower power compared to the latest commercial chip tech from Intel and TSMC.

The Peking team outlines the new technology in a snappily-title research paper, in Nature, "Low-power 2D gate-all-around logics via epitaxial monolithic 3D integration."

(... talk about what is bismuth and the EUV lithography machine from Huawei ...)

(...) Notably and somewhat more comprehensibly, the team claims a 30 nm gate length. If that sounds a lot bigger than today's supposed 3 nm technology from, say, TSMC, the reality is that the likes of "3 nm" are more marketing terms than reflective of the physical realities of current technology.

By way of example, TSMC's N3E node as used in the latest Apple chips has gate pitch of at minimum 45 nm and a metal pitch of 23 nm. Intel's 18A node is said to have a 30-36 nm metal pitch. Either way, nowhere near 3 nm.

The claimed upshot includes the aforementioned 1.4x operating speeds at 90% power consumption versus cutting edge commercial silicon nodes. Given that Intel and TSMC nodes are hardly identical, it's not clear how that is calculated. However, if you take 5 GHz as a rough yardstick for top-end current chip speeds, excluding a few relative edge cases, you'd be looking at a 7 GHz processor, which is getting on some.

As a result, the Peking team claims they have, "the fastest, most efficient transistor ever.” Whether they actually do or not is another matter. But this research, along with the Huawei lithography machine, certainly feeds into a broader narrative of the Chinese building momentum in chip tech.

Last edited by JEMC - 16 hours ago