Very important post, BCD, thank you!

I'd like to stress what you said by once again referring to the PET news release and to the Wikipedia article "Semiconductor device fabrication".

The PET news release says "PET technology is predicted to deliver performance, which could be equivalent to 3 to 4 nodes ahead of mainstream technologies." This very sentence doesn't explicitly say "PET technology at 40 nm node size", but from the context of this news release as well as the foundry news release, it should be pretty clear that we are talking about 40 nm here.

Okay, now to the "mainstream technologies". Referring to the table on the top-right of this Wikipedia article, one can conclude that the 22 nm silicon process is mainstream. Sure, Intel is going to release 14 nm products this year, but I wouldn't call it mainstream yet. Now let's go 3 to 4 nodes ahead, i.e. down in the table. Starting from 22 nm, that means 7 or 5 nm. As you pointed out, BCD, it is unclear whether silicon will ever get there, and if it still does, only at extreme costs and not any faster than 4 to 6 years from now.

Based on the above, I believe 40 nm PET will indeed blow 22 nm and 14 nm silicon out of the water.