What If We Made Transistors in a Smaller Size? Wouldn't It Help to Make the Chips Bigger?
Chips have become pretty large in modern times. But there is a penalty for making chips too large. The first is cost. The cost of a same-sized, same process silicon wafer will be the same regardless of how many dice you fit on it. So if I can hold 100 dice rather than 50, the physical production cost of my chip drops in half. But it’s even better that, due to the defect density of the silicon wafer. Every silicon wafer has defects, and those will cause some of the chips to fail. If I have 20 flaws across 50 chips, I will have only 30 chips. If I have 20 defects across 100 chips, that leaves me with at least 80 chips that work. So the larger chip may cost me 2.6x as much in just this simple case. And then other issues. Smaller geometries offer lower power, faster signal propagation, etc. Shrinking doesn’t help all the time. For example, flash memory was getting less reliable and long-lived as it shrunk. So the state-of-the-art flash went to larger L-eff chips, but 3D chips, which may