March 2022 Update: Intel Video, India, Apple

Amazingly, it is already the last Friday in March (and so the last Friday in Q1, it has flown by). So time for one of my update posts where I put stories that are too small to justify an entire blog post, and updates on topics I posted about earlier.

Breakfast Bytes on LinkedIn

First, a bit of Breakfast Bytes administration. There is now a Breakfast Bytes "newsletter" (in LinkedIn terminology). Instead of posting under my own LinkedIn account, I put a post there every day. You can find the page here. Even if you already follow me as an individual, you should subscribe to the Breakfast Bytes Newsletter so that you get notifications when I post there. It was gratifying for me to see that within three days, 500 people had already signed up.

Intel Video

I follow the Intel Technology channel on YouTube. Note that there is also a separate Intel channel too, for more corporate stuff. Sometimes Intel produces really good educational videos. For example, in my post How Intel Manufactures Chips I covered a video on manufacturing. At the end of February, Intel produced an educational video on the evolution of transistors from planar, to strained silicon, to Hi-K dielectric, to FinFET, to gate-all-around (GAA). It also covers the transition of interconnect from aluminum to copper, which requires a completely different manufacturing process. The video is five minutes long.

Here's an interesting screenshot from the video showing the size of a modern transistor at 3nm or so, compared to 12um (12000nm) that Intel used for the 4004, the first microprocessor.

While on the topic of Intel, it announced a $88B investment in Europe, some for two fabs in Magdeburg, Germany (about halfway between Hanover and Berlin). Also investment in Spain, France, and Poland. You can see the video it produced for the announcement:

Apple's Goes Big

On March 8th, Apple had one of their semi-annual announcement days. They announced lots of consumer stuff like new phone colors but my wheelhouse is the semiconductor stuff. Apple announced that it had a secret that they'd kept quiet about. The M1 Max chip actually has die-to-die interconnect on it, which it calls Ultra Fusion. They have put two M1 Max chips together to create a 114B transistor behemoth called the M1 Ultra. The bandwidth between the two die is 2.5 TB/s. Of course, it basically has the spec of two M1 Max chips, you can just double the numbers for all the cores. That gives you 20 high-performance cores, 4 high-efficiency cores, 64 core GPU, 32 core neural engine, 2 media engines, and 128 GB of unified memory. It is built in 5nm. Although it was said that the two chips were on an "interposer", the animation showed something much smaller just along the edges where the two chips meet, a sort of interconnect bridge. Also, although the animation (and the images above) show the chip with the transistors and interconnect on top, I assume they are actually flipped over to avoid the need for TSVs.

The processor is available in a new desktop system called the MacStudio, which seems to be targeted primarily at video editing. In a teaser, Apple said there was one more M1 to come for the Pro systems. So keep watching this space.

Lots more details in the Apple Newsroom.

India Chips Program

I wrote recently about various programs to incentivize local semiconductor manufacturing in my post China, US, Europe: Everybody's Got a CHIPS Act. Well, I left out India, and they have a CHIPS act too with a budget of Rs 76,000-Cr. For those unfamiliar with the Indian numbering system, a crore is 10M. A crore of Rupees is about $250,000, so this is about $20B. It seems to be mainly focused on education rather than building fabs. In Fortune India, Union minister for electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnavsaid said:

Around 20% of the engineers in the semiconductor industry in the world are from India. The decision has been taken today to design a C2S (Chips to Startup) program for 85,000 highly trained and qualified engineers,

By the way, Japan also has government funds approved, but only $6.8B, which is a drop in the bucket when a modern fab costs $15-20B. Korea also has a program, although it doesn't seem to have a budget number associated with it. It is more focused on education and also getting semiconductor investment into parts of the country outside the greater Seoul area, where all the companies you've heard of are based.

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