Comment by tucnak
24 days ago
I wrote here a couple days ago: "For a Hacker News degenerate, everything in the world revolves around bean-counting B2B SaaS CRUD crapps, but it doesn't mean it's all there is to the world, right?"
24 days ago
I wrote here a couple days ago: "For a Hacker News degenerate, everything in the world revolves around bean-counting B2B SaaS CRUD crapps, but it doesn't mean it's all there is to the world, right?"
I didn't even know that 180nm was still a thing but clearly it is because apparently the cost difference is like USD 100M for 180nm vs USD 10B or more for the latest tech?
Is it true that we will likely have these 180nm chips for things like light bulbs for the foreseeable future?
Yes, actually 180 nm still represents a sizable amount of the market, in terms of volume! In more niche applications where chips contain lots of analog functionlity, you can still find plenty of designs being done in 180, 130, 110, and 65 nm. Most corporate designs don't disclose this, but I'd venture to guess the majority of integrated circuits in your home are made on these larger "process nodes". I work in 65nm and 130nm, for example. Free to ask if you want to know more!
I work in a similar market, and we're only just starting to phase out these larger nodes and move to 22nm simply for wafer availability.
It doesn't benefit from 22nm - analog blocks generally don't scale down at all, they have to be a particular size to achieve particular current handling, inductance etc. requirements. But we need the production line availability.
I'm not OP, but perhaps you, or somebody else here, could answer my question, albeit one that is slightly off-topic. In the recent years, in part courtesy of cryptoindustry investment, there were many advancements in zero-knowledge mathematics and applied cryptography. I've been on-and-off researching computational approaches to liquid democracy[1], on the off-chance that we may one day apply it in my country, Ukraine, and I came to conclusion that open hardware-as-public good are table stakes to that end. The modern computers are way too complex, and the trust in them is at an all-time low. To bring computation into politics—it's a tall order. However, if we could buy a fab, design some hardware transparently, allow inspections from civil groups and scientists, maybe that could work... What kind of costs are we looking at for establishing something like 130nm process, and would it be possible to buy out the necessary IP, too, so that everything could be done in the open?
Does this even work longterm? I'd like to think transparent-by-design hardware manufacturing is not a pipe dream, but if that's the case, I would hate to give it too much thought.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
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Thanks for offering. Do you do analog design, and which market niche are you targeting: low cost per part or something else?
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More thank light bulbs. As you have correctly pointed it out, its a matter of economics: 180nm is CHEAP! So a lot more things become economically viable, think of all the weird specialized ASICs that used to be to expensive to build.
Not only that, but 180nm/130nm is the only option that is OpenSourced, as of now. Transistor Libraries for ICs (or, PDKs) have long been proprietary. I'm only aware of IHP and Sky130, which are actually banking on Fossi or Libre Silicon design.
That's what is expected to finally kill Moore's law: the economics. At some point it'll still be technically possible to fabricate smaller IC structures, stack more layers etc, but the tech to do so (and fabs to do it at scale) will be costly enough that it's just not worth it.
The other point is of course a next-gen fab first needs to be built, and get those yields up. While previous-gen fab already exists - with all the fine-tuning already done & kinks ironed out. Not to mention maaanny applications simply don't need complex ICs (typical 32bit uC comes to mind, but even 8bit ones are still around).