Firm predicts it will cost $28 billion to build a 2nm fab and $30,000 per wafer, a 50 percent increase in chipmaking costs as complexity rises::As wafer fab tools are getting more expensive, so do fabs and, ultimately, chips. A new report claims that
I didn’t think the ~5nm limit could be broke due to quantum tunneling.
The nm number is just the smallest part on the waffer. It’s not actually the transistor.
This was my understanding as well: That beyond ~7nm the reliability begins to lose value because the diameter of an electron ‘orbit’ or whatever becomes a factor.
Admittedly I’m not an expert. But my understanding was that to break this limitation and keep Moore’s law were kinda leaning into quantum computation to eventually fill the incoming void.
The reason you mean is quantum tunneling. Essentially, at that small a scale an electron can ‘teleport’ outside of the system, which is obviously a big nono for computing.
They solved this problem by making the nanometer bigger.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process