This is what the death of Moore’s law looks like: EUV rollout slowed, 450mm wafers halted, and an uncertain path beyond 14nm

• By Joel Hruska on March 17, 2014 at 1:50 pm
• 92 Comments

So, uh, what now?

As longtime industry expert Chris Mack has pointed out on his blog,Lithoguru, long-term trends have seen lithography eating an increasing percentage of total manufacturing costs every single generation. If the economics of lithography scaling no longer make sense below 14nm, the big-picture solution is to exploit improvements in a different area of the manufacturing pipeline where economics still allow for it.

Dr. Mack believes that 3D transistors and the integration of TSVs (through-silicon vias) may present the only feasible way forward for microprocessor designs. There’s also talk of combining fully-depleted SOI (FD-SOI) and FinFET designs, or proceeding with the development of gate all-around transistors which would rely on nanowires — another emerging, extremely difficult area.

What’s noteworthy in all this? The uncertainty.