There Moore’s law is alive and well – Intel has what it takes to prove it, promising”trillion transistors” by the year 2030 and did so in the context of the 75th anniversary of the creation of the Transistor at IEDM 2022.
The idea is to outclass the competition by establishing a new hierarchy with its most advanced technologies such as High Numerical Aperture Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography.
With this method, the company will be able to exponentially increase the etching resolution of circuits, reducing the chip components by 1.7 times, while at the same time increasing the density by as much as 2.9 timeswith all due respect to the fierce competitors (should this scenario materialize) and the current race for the nanometer.
Intel’s roadmap towards Angstrom already made this concept clear, with a choice that initially aroused a lot of skepticism, that of eliminating the unit of measurement from the nomenclature of its nodes to make it clear what the real terms of comparison were net of size: Intel 7 at 10 nanometers, for example, it had to be compared to 7 nanometer nodes of competitors and so on.
Despite this, Intel also clearly intends to continue towards greater density and optimization of spaces, to the point of pulling these mind-boggling numbers out of the hat. Talking was Gary PattonVP of Intel, who explained that “seventy-five years after the invention of the transistor, innovation continues along the path traced by Moore’s Law, continuing to satisfy an exponentially growing demand for information technology. At IEDM 2022 Intel will show both its forward-looking vision and concrete research steps needed to break current and future barriers“, with a clear reference to the announced 2 nanometer “RibbonFET” node 20A, the first step towards the Angstrom era which will be fully accomplished only the following year with node 18A.
Among Intel’s future goals, to make this huge leap into the future, there will be not only 3D stacking and packaging, but also the futuristic 2D technology that will allow the use of layers of just three atoms thick (three!) to dramatically increase the density of the transistors and even surpass even RibbonFET.
