Obstacles to the development of semiconductor production no longer resemble barriers, but tall walls. And yet the industry is moving forward step by step, following empirical evidence derived 55 years ago. . Although with reservations, the number of transistors in chips continues to double every two years.
Not to be unfounded analysts of IC Insights on the state of the semiconductor market in 2020. The report includes the history of the development of the main markets since 71: DRAM memory, NAND flash memory, microprocessors and graphics processors.
Analysts note that over the past 10-15 years, factors such as power consumption and scaling limitations have begun to strongly influence the growth rate of the number of transistors in some integrated products. But in general, new developments and new approaches to the design and production of chips allow us to count on the further preservation of Moore's law.
Thus, the number of transistors in DRAM chips in the early 2000s increased at an average rate of about 45% per year, but has slowed to 2016% per year since 20 after the introduction of Samsung's 16Gb memory chips. The DDR5 standard, which is still being finalized by JEDEC, will include 24 Gb, 32 Gb, and 64 Gb monolithic devices, and this is a new leap forward.
Annual growth in flash density remained at 2012-55% per year until 60, but has since dropped to 30-35% per year. For planar flash memory chips, the highest density was 128 Gb (data as of January 2020). But the maximum density of the 3D NAND chip reached 1,33 Tbit for 96-layer memory with four bits written to each cell (QLC). By the end of the year, 1,5 Tbit 128-layer microcircuits are promised to appear, with a subsequent increase in capacity to 2 Tbit.
The number of transistors in Intel microprocessors for PCs grew by about 2010% per year until 40, but in subsequent years this figure has halved. The number of transistors continues to grow in the company's server processors. This growth stalled in the mid-to-late 2000s, but then continued again at a rate of about 25% per year. Intel stopped disclosing transistor count details in 2017.
The number of transistors in Apple's application processors in iPhone smartphones and iPad tablets has increased by 2013% per year since 43. This figure includes data from the A13 processor with its 8,5 billion transistors. Apple is expected to introduce an iPad Pro powered by the new A2020X processor in the first half of 13.
NVIDIA's high-performance GPUs have extremely high transistor counts. Unlike microprocessors, GPUs, with their highest degree of architectural parallelism, do not contain a significant amount of cache memory, leaving a lot of room for logic (transistors). The company's continued focus on machine learning and AI accelerators will only fuel this trend.
Source: 3dnews.ru