TSMC: Does Moore's Law really fail?

Posted by Pansy Chan on July 3rd, 2019

Technology and innovation are triggering a new round of industrial change. At present, the global integrated circuit industry is in a period of technological change. The speed of Moore's Law has been greatly slowed down, and the development path of integrated circuit technology is gradually shifting toward the trend of multi-functional integration. At the World Semiconductor Summit Summit in 2019, Luo Zhenqiu, general manager of TSMC (Nanjing) Co., Ltd. pointed out in his keynote speech on "Semiconductor Industry Development Trends".

Luo Zhenqiu, General Manager of TSMC (Nanjing) Co., Ltd.

At this stage, no matter whether it is a computer, a mobile phone or other terminals, people need to issue instructions. Luo Zhenqiu believes that in the future, these devices or machines can communicate with each other, command each other and serve users, and this is the so-called Internet of Everything. Undoubtedly, semiconductors are one of the most important drivers of the IT industry. Semiconductor applications continue to increase, and society's expectations for semiconductor technology are increasing.

For the development of the semiconductor industry, Luo Zhenqiu said that TSMC promotes Moore's Law forward through process support, advances Moore's Law through three-dimensional packaging, and improves energy efficiency ratio through hardware and software.

Breakthrough in EUV-assisted lithography

In the process of microfilm evolution, EUV technology (far ultraviolet lithography) is indispensable. The difficulty of the technology of the lithography machine mainly observes its wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the technical difficulty, which means that the precision is better.

As shown above, each cell represents a 10-fold relationship, and TSMC successively enters the lithography stage of 248 and 193 nm. The 193 nm lithography machine is more compatible and compatible with all specifications from 40 nm to 7 nm. At present, the 7nm process chip TSMC has been mass-produced, and the 40nm 40 lithography machine is still used.

From the perspective of future development, the 193 nm lithography machine wavelength is 193, and the EUV wavelength is 13.5 nm, which means that the future EUV 桎梏 has broken through. In the future, the process of lithography breakthrough is no longer a problem.

New materials are the next step

In terms of materials, the transistor structure has changed from flat to stereo, and TSMC is currently working on a better transistor structure. In addition, the new two-dimensional materials have many unique optoelectronic properties not found in traditional materials, especially their excellent nonlinear optical properties have shown great potential in building high-performance, new-function optoelectronic devices. The two-dimensional material is generally a three-dimensional structure, and the thinness of the two-dimensional material means that its field effect is getting better and better, and the height is getting lower and lower, which also indicates that the process can be further reduced. The new material is the next step of TSMC's efforts. In addition, TSMC's current “enhanced” transistor architecture has also contributed to the continued development and advancement of semiconductor technology.

IC integration improves sword design innovation

TSMC is not only dedicated to the combination of memory and CPU, but also heterogeneously combines ICs with different functions, including MEMS, RF, and so on. The future development trend of TSMC lies in heterogeneous integration (integration of packages) for different chips for different application scenarios.

In terms of IC design, silicon wafers and silicon wafers are generally used at this stage, and there will be some innovations in the future, such as: wearing VF, the next column to wear up to replace the copper foil substrate connection; or 6 nanometer connection VF is directly connected to VF. The shortening of the distance means that the area is reduced.

At the beginning of designing the IC, a design that divides the design of the IC into blocks is used to facilitate better stacking in the future. I is designed as a part, the logic is designed as a part, and the MEMS is designed as a part. After designing, the parts are connected in series. Due to this changing process, design companies also need to make some adjustments and changes in the design concept. During the design process, it is necessary to rethink the distance of the wire during packaging, which is more conducive to the reduction of the area.

Software and hardware synchronization is required to improve energy efficiency

In order to improve the energy efficiency ratio, TSMC implemented the GPU's corresponding measures for drawing, which not only improved the energy efficiency ratio, but also opened up new ICs for different applications to specifically handle events. For future development, dedicated DSP or CPU can not handle the event, or can use software refactoring, the hardware can be reconstructed by software to perform different special applications, so as to achieve soft and hard combination, so that energy efficiency is further improved. TSMC's goal is to increase energy efficiency by 1000 times compared to traditional general-purpose CPUs.

Regarding future application scenarios, the future trend is that CPUs and DSPs are still needed due to scene requirements. After the program is completed, the compiler will consider the hardware architecture. When the program is executed, the editing structure is rebuilt to deal with the special application scenario. All functions are optimized, shared, and used by the soft language and compiler in the same application scenario.

summary

Part of the transistor, TSMC will continue to move forward in accordance with Moore's Law, relying on new materials, new architecture, and continue to move forward. Regarding the 3D package, TSMC uses a continuous stacking method to make the area smaller. Innovative design has helped the height of IC integration. In addition, the combination of software and hardware can fully improve the energy efficiency of the device in the use of the scene.