NVIDIA's Sameer Halepete, vice president of VLSI engineering, called for a move to 450mm wafers to resolve, stating larger wafers are necessary to be able to profitably deliver chips with a trillion transistors. Full details at EE Times.
A diverse host of new technologies and methods will be needed to keep the industry on track to profitably deliver a trillion-transistor device by the end of the decade, said Sameer Halepete, vice president of VLSI engineering at Nvidia. “The challenges are similar to what they were before, and though their nature has changed, I’m very confident we will surmount them,” Halepete said in a keynote at a Mentor Graphics user conference here.
The industry needs to move to 450mm wafers to deal with the increasing number of masks and process steps required to make chips, he told EE Times in a discussion before the keynote. The larger wafers would spread the costs out among more chips and reduce the processing time per chip, he said.
However, Halapete said he is not seeing any signs the shift to the larger wafers will come in time for the 14nm process node. That’s the next big jump after the 28nm chips Nvidia and others are just starting to deliver.
