MolaKule
Staff member
Apple Strikes Deal with Broadcom for U.S.-Made RF Chips
- Thread starter MolaKule
- Start date
too many chips are made in two countries on earth, both facing extinction from evil forces.
Extinction lol
3nm and 4nm nodes. Have mercy. 65nm when I started in SEMI.
Taiwan is by far the largest source (TSMC and UMC) of semiconductors in the world because those companies are very good at what they do. But then there's production in South Korea, Japan, the United States, and Europe.
The original Broadcom was fabless, but it's really from the purchase of the old Broadcom by Avago, where this fab came from Avago.
I don't think they typically use the smallest nodes for analog. Wouldn't make much sense.
Hey, at least it’s not Intel 14nm+++++
Yeah, analog suffers actually. IO and transceiver degradation is unfortunately a thing on some ICs.
Yep. However not a lot of purely analog IC’s out there, lot of mixed signal ones and they can take advantage of the smaller digital gates. After all, just because the process can do 4nm doesn’t mean every transistor has to be that small.
But the process still has to accommodate the high voltages, if it is a high voltage part.
Hey, at least it’s not Intel 14nm+++++
We were working with 2 micron processes in my college layout projects using MAGIC with 2 metal layers. But I remember when I started and our program managers were fighting to get access to production .35 micron (350 nm) capacity. And one place I worked where we had something specialized where we were using .6 micron.
Canon and Sony make large image sensors for dSLRs, and getting it down to the smallest process node would be a disaster since each sensor pixel is way larger than that. Their primary cost considerations are per unit area (not per transistor/gate), and older is cheaper. I believe they use their own fabs for that. There are fabless companies that do specialized silicon image sensors, and keeping up with older fabs closing or moving to smaller process nodes keeps them busy.
Can’t think of a single phone that does that, they have multiple chips doing different functions. Front end modules, modems, and transceivers will all be their own dedicated chips.
Even a lot of single package components are made of chiplets where each one can be made with a different process.
Yeah, I think all companies are preparing contingencies to move off shore China. Glad to see chip manufacturers doing the same. We cant be dependent on overseas suppliers, it's a national security risk.
There will be a confrontation one day, China is not our friend by any means, nor of our interests overseas or on the island of Cuba where their spy operations are based. This is not a political statement, just acknowledging all the advances in technology we have offshored and now in a position where our security is at risk, as some of the chips themselves are needed for our military yet made in China and Taiwan.
There will be a confrontation one day, China is not our friend by any means, nor of our interests overseas or on the island of Cuba where their spy operations are based. This is not a political statement, just acknowledging all the advances in technology we have offshored and now in a position where our security is at risk, as some of the chips themselves are needed for our military yet made in China and Taiwan.
The pixels aren't the whole story on a sensor, though.
Yes, they're relatively large. Nikon's current "workhorse" sensor is the backside-illuminated 45mp that first showed up in the D850 and variants of it have made their way into the Z7, Z7II, Z8, and Z9 mirrorless cameras. This sensor is fabbed by Sony, and I'm mentioning it because it's well documented and has had a lot of fun tech added to it. The pixel size on this sensor is 4.35µm.
CMOS sensors put the A/D converters and some other circuitry on the sensor. Backside illumination adds a lot more interconnects and so forth to move all of that out of the way of the pixels. I've actually been really impressed by how clean the D850 is compared to its lower resolution(36mp) predecessors the D810 and D800(I own all three cameras-used a D800 for several years before buying the D810 and then a D850 last year but the D850 is my current go-to).
Nikon really put a lot of effort into converting this to a so-called stacked design with the Z9(and now the Z8) which integrates the image processor and some DRAM buffer into the sensor package also. CMOS sensors have relatively low read-out speeds, but the Z9 was able to increase the readout speed enough that they could eliminate the mechanical shutter completely. By all accounts in the real world it's been a success, and talking to people who use them in the real world there are only a few fringe cases where the $1000-more-expensive, lower resolution D6 makes sense now(the D6 does still have faster autofocus in some circumstances plus is still better in low light).
My point in all of that, though, is that even though the pixels are big, there are some pretty involved electronics physically behind the pixels to make it all work. The stacked sensors are really impressive technology as this goes.
Lately I've been dabbling in Fujifilm offerings with the 40mp X-T5. This is one of the highest if not the highest pixel density sensors currently on the market in an interchangeable lens camera. Fuji doesn't make "full frame" 24x36mm cameras, but rather just APS-C(~16.9x24mm) and medium format(43.8x32.9mm) cameras. I THINK Sony does all of their fab also. In any case, if the 40mp APS-C sensor were scaled up to 24x36mp, by my math it would be around 90mp. I've actually been really impressed by the low light performance, in particular, of a sensor with such tiny pixels. This generation of sensor from Fuji, though, also has a 26mp stacked sensor(~60mp if scaled up to full frame) that's quite impressive in readout speed.
