Moore's Law once stated that the economics of the semiconductor market were based solely on transistor density with little consideration of power. But as applications have evolved, chipmakers have shifted their focus to improving power, performance, and area (PPA) to continue steady progress. In an interview, Dr. Kevin Zhang, head of process technology at TSMC, told Ian Cutress on the TechTechPotato YouTube channel (transcript here) that he isn't worried about Moore's Law as long as overall progress continues.
“Well, my answer is simple: I don't care,” Kevin Chang told Ian. “As long as we can continue to drive the scaling of technology, I don't care if Moore's Law is alive or dead.”
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Indeed, TSMC's strength is its ability to introduce new process technologies every year and provide the performance, power, and area (PPA) improvements that customers demand. For about a decade, Apple has been an alpha customer of TSMC, and so the evolution of TSMC's process technology is very well explained by the evolution of Apple's processors.
But if we look at TSMC's capabilities beyond Apple's processors, we'll look at AMD's Instinct MI300X and Instinct MI300A processors with AI and HPC capabilities. Both products make extensive use of TSMC's 2.5D and 3D integration and are perhaps the best examples of the foundry's capabilities.
Indeed, TSMC and its customers are focused on 3D scaling.
“[Observers] “The narrow sense of Moore's Law, based on two-dimensional scaling, is no longer true,” Zhang said. “If you look at the hype of innovation in the industry, we are really continuing to explore different ways to integrate more functionality and capabilities into smaller form factors. We continue to achieve higher levels of performance and higher levels of power efficiency. So from that perspective, I think Moore's Law, the scaling of technology, will continue.”
When asked about TSMC's success with incremental process node improvements, Kevin Zhang made it clear that the company's progress is no small thing. TSMC highlighted that the foundry's move from 5nm to 3nm-class process nodes has improved PPA by more than 30% per generation. TSMC continues to make small but continuous enhancements between major nodes to ensure customers benefit from each new technology generation.
