By Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney<\/p>\n
SANTA CLARA, California, April 22 (Reuters) – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co on Wednesday showed its newest generation of chip manufacturing technology, saying it expects to be able to create \u200csmaller, faster chips without requiring expensive new machines from ASML.<\/p>\n
TSMC, the global giant that makes chips for \u200cNvidia<\/a>, Apple<\/a> and Google, among many others, showed two improvements of chipmaking technology: One called A13, which will go into production in 2029 and \u200blikely be used for artificial intelligence<\/a> chips, and one called N2U, a more affordable option that can be used to make chips for phones and laptops, as well as AI chips.<\/p>\n For all of the technologies TSMC showed on Wednesday, it is planning to squeeze more gains out of its existing extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines from Dutch supplier ASML, rather than move to a newer \u200cgeneration of “high NA” EUV machines, which, at $400 \u2060million each, are roughly double the cost of the older machines.<\/p>\n “This is where I think our R&D has done exceptionally well in terms of leveraging existing EUV technology while setting an \u2060aggressive technology scaling roadmap,” Kevin Zhang, deputy co-chief operations officer and senior vice president, told Reuters. “This is definitely a strength.”<\/p>\n But the gains from smaller and faster chips are modest, and TSMC also showed plans for new technologies in stitching complex AI chips together, which \u200bis \u200bwhere analysts expect companies like Nvidia to get the most performance \u200bgains in coming years. Where current AI offerings \u200clike Nvidia’s Vera Rubin, which will come out this year and is made by TSMC, have two large computing chips and eight stacks of high-bandwidth memory, TSMC on Wednesday said that by 2028 it will have the ability to stitch together 10 large chips and 20 memory stacks.<\/p>\n Named after Intel CEO Gordon Moore, his eponymous law predicted that computing power would roughly double every two years while at the same time get cheaper. In recent years, some such as Nvidia’s \u200cCEO Jensen Huang have said that it no longer holds true.<\/p>\n TSMC \u200bis effectively extending Moore’s law through the company’s technology that stitches multiple \u200bchips together, according to Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of \u200bTechInsights.<\/p>\n “Moore\u2019s law is morphing from a monolithic, single die in a package to multi-die in \u200ca package,” he said in an interview. “And that allows \u200bthe power and performance gains.”<\/p>\n But \u200bstitching together chips brings challenges of its own. The chips get hot as they operate, and the different materials used to package them together expand at different rates, creating a fresh set of challenges for chip \u200bdesigners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Stephen Nellis and Max A. Cherney SANTA CLARA, California, April 22 (Reuters) – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[65,4871,522,4869,461,4870,4872,1454,4873],"class_list":{"0":"post-5120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-asml","8":"tag-asml","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-euv","11":"tag-gordon-moore","12":"tag-nvidia","13":"tag-santa-clara","14":"tag-taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing-co","15":"tag-tsmc","16":"tag-vera-rubin"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}