TSMC's 3nm node powers up, setting stage for tech giants' next-gen chips

TSMC will see its 3nm node represent over 20 percent of its revenue this year as the node of choice for upcoming processors designed by AMD, Apple, and Intel. The semiconductor giant's 3nm process was introduced in late 2022 and hit its stride in 2023. However, Apple is currently the only company to use processors fabricated …

[carbon unit]

where's intel......

Its brutal watching intel's fab plants run away from the cutting edge, seems to be taking a long time to fix there problems.......

[gecho]

EUV

I watched a few videos about the ASML EUV machines used for the state of the art process nodes, and those things are more complex than I could have imagined. The light is borderline X-ray and is readily absorbed so they can't use lenses in the system. The entire focusing chain are special 100 layer mirrors, even the chip mask is a mirror. The machines total power consumption is 1MW. To generate the light they need to hit tin droplets traveling at 70 meters / second with a laser once to flatten the drop and a second time to vaporize it at a rate of 50,000 times per second.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the NIF needs to do to achieve industrial scale fusion power is license the 50 times/sec part of the technology.

at NIF, scientists fire an array of nearly 200 lasers at a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a diamond capsule the size of a peppercorn, itself inside a gold cylinder. The lasers heat up the cylinder’s outside, creating a series of very fast explosions, generating large amounts of energy collected as heat.

... but so far, it's paced at around one explosion per published paper.