Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang simply summed up how the next-generation of chip manufacturing will work, and the video clip makes for nice watching in case you’re in any means within the extremely complicated and costly course of.
The section from Huang’s GTC keynote above explains how machines from an organization known as ASML will create the next-generation of laptop chips. ASML gives lithographic machines to each main chip producer, together with TSMC, utilized by Nvidia, AMD and Intel; and Intel’s personal foundry. ASML’s newest and best are constructed for what’s often called EUV, or excessive ultraviolet lithography, a extremely complicated means of printing ever-shrinking circuits onto silicon chips.
It is simple to sum up EUV and all the trendy lithographic course of as “magic” or “miraculous”, as Huang himself does, however it’s simply extremely difficult. EUV expertise has been a long time within the making, and felt at one level prefer it may by no means arrive. In essence, nonetheless, EUV tries to simplify the already extremely time-consuming and complicated DUV (deep ultraviolet) lithographic course of used as we speak.
EUV is the important thing to shrinking transistors right down to smaller sizes required for extra superior course of nodes, and thus extra superior CPUs and GPUs with extra circuitry squished inside them. TSMC rolled EUV out with its N7+ node, and makes use of EUV for increasingly more layers with its N5 and N3 course of nodes, whereas Intel will use EUV from its Intel 4 node onwards.
Within the video there’s an impressively detailed diagram of an ASML EUV machine—a large machine that prices someplace within the ballpark of $250 million.
And Huang is making such a fuss of ASML and EUV throughout his keynote speech as a result of Nvidia is asserting a brand new device, cuLitho (opens in new tab), that makes use of GPU acceleration on its graphics playing cards to hurry up the method of designing the masks utilized in lithography by some 40x.
Yeah, Nvidia’s paying TSMC to make its GPUs solely to promote them proper again to it. That is a industrial play if ever I noticed one.