As I mentioned in my Blog on April 7, Moore’s law will turn 50 on April 19. What I did not emphasize enough in my discussion on silicon process evolution is size, or more accurately tininess.

In that post, I stated: “The fin width in a 14 nm process transistor is actually only 8nm! This is equivalent to about 15 layers of silicon lattice.” 

But most people can not fathom what 8nm actually means. It is much smaller than you would assume. It truly is at the atomic scale, and the atomic scale is small beyond belief.

Let’s put a common reference point into place for it: the width of a human hair. It is about 75 μm (micrometers) on average. So how many 8 nm fins would you need to put side by side to match a human hair? It is 9,375 fins! 

Another way of looking at this is speed. Human hair grows at about 1.25 cm per month. This means about 42 μm per day or 1.7μm per hour. 

So the question is how long would it take for a human hair to growth the width of a 14nm FinFET fin (8 nm).

It would take only 0.017 seconds! How fast is this really? The blink of an eye takes about 0.35 seconds. Hence during the time it takes to blink, your hair would grow the length of about 20 times of the width of a 14nm FinFET fin.

Now this is what I would call tiny!

To hammer down the point let’s look at one more comparison. In 1971, the common structure size was 10 μm. This was also the year when the Intel microprocessor 4004 was released and transformed the entire industry. If we form a square of 10 μm x 10 μm, we get 100 μm2. We need to take into account that a single transistor in 10 μm technology is much larger than 100 μm2. The Intel 6T SRAM cell in 14nm FinFET is 0.0588 μm2. This means a 10 μm square could fit 1,700 bit cells or 10,204 transistors. 

Keep on scaling!

Axel Scherer

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