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 should you’re in any means within the extremely advanced and costly course of.
The phase from Huang’s GTC keynote above explains how machines from an organization referred to as ASML will create the next-generation of laptop chips. ASML offers 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 biggest are constructed for what’s often known as EUV, or excessive ultraviolet lithography, a extremely advanced means of printing ever-shrinking circuits onto silicon chips.
It is easy to sum up EUV and the complete fashionable lithographic course of as “magic” or “miraculous”, as Huang himself does, however it’s simply extremely sophisticated. EUV expertise has been a long time within the making, and felt at one level prefer it would possibly by no means arrive. In essence, nevertheless, EUV tries to simplify the already extremely time-consuming and complicated DUV (deep ultraviolet) lithographic course of used at the moment.
EUV is the important thing to shrinking transistors all the way 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 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 system 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 saying 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 business play if ever I noticed one.