Experts: The semiconductor industry still has three tough battles to fight

Source: Content from " Digital Times ", thank you.

TSMC will start mass production of 5nm in 2020. Intel announced on the 8th that 7nm process products will not be launched until 2021. As the progress of 10nm has been delayed several times before, legal persons have questioned whether this schedule can be met. With major semiconductor manufacturers still competing in the nano-process competition, how long will it take for the arrival of the quantum computer era?

Quanta Computer Chairman Barry Lam has always been concerned about cutting-edge technology, but he was unwilling to give a direct answer to this question. Instead, he gave two aspects to think about. The first is to observe the current evolution of Taiwan's semiconductor development process, and the second is the application field of such "ultra-high-speed computing."

Barry Lam said that the semiconductor industry will have to fight a 7-nanometer battle in 2020, and will start a 5-nanometer battle in 2021 or 2022. It is estimated that the 3.5-nanometer war will not begin until after 2024. "The current semiconductor technology still has at least three battles to fight," all the way until after 2027, which is at least 10 years away.

On the other hand, Barry Lam said that quantum computing does not use semiconductor technology, the operation algorithm is not traditional binary, and the software is still unclear. Countries such as France and the United States are still investing in research. Because everything is still too vague, many experts believe that quantum computers are 15 to 20 years away. "We will definitely do this, but it's too far away now." Barry Lam said.

At this stage, all major manufacturers are competing in the process competition. Intel CEO Bob Swan and Technology President Murthy Renduchintala discussed Intel's processor development schedule at the shareholders meeting on the 8th. Swan announced that the 10nm notebook processor "Ice Lake" will be available in June 2019, and notebook devices are expected to be mass-produced before the end of the year.

She announced at the briefing that a large number of 10nm process products will be launched between 2019 and 2020, such as laptop CPUs in the second half of this year and server CPUs in the first half of 2020. Compared with TSMC's 7nm mass production stage, Intel estimates that it will enter the 7nm process in 2021.

However, TSMC plans to mass-produce 5nm in 2020, and TSMC can almost be said to have full mass production of 5nm in 2021, which shows the gap in process progress between Intel and TSMC.

Barry Lam said that the past was an era of ten times the speed, as semiconductors were limited by physical processes. In the past few years, the industry was still hotly discussing 10 nanometers, but now 7 nanometers has been mass-produced and the 5 nanometer era will soon be here.

Facing the future of quantum computers, where will semiconductors go? Barry Lam said with a smile, I don’t know, maybe they (TSMC) are developing new things, because they have the financial and material resources. Although quantum computers will change the CPU algorithm, "silicon" will still be used and will not disappear.

Why do you say that? Barry Lam said that quantum computers are the fastest computing machines and are not easy to use in business. This ultra-high-speed computing may be used in black hole observations, but is not actually used in general commercial applications.