From ExtremeTech: In the wake of Intel’s 10nm delay(s), it makes sense to wonder what this means for the company’s 7nm node. We’ve seen reports that Intel has canceled its 10nm node altogether, with strong pushback from the company on those rumors. At the same time, it’s true that there’s typically a progression to these things, with new nodes only arriving a few years after each other. At the 39th Nasdaq Investors Conference, Murthy Renduchintala, Intel’s CEO and group president, spoke and shared details both on what went wrong with 10nm and the company’s roadmap to 7nm.
According to Renduchintala, the problems with 10nm are directly related to the fact that Intel chose not to introduce EUV at that node, but instead pushed for an incredibly aggressive 2.7x scaling factor. The problem with doing this on DUV lithography (deep ultraviolet) is that it requires you to use multi-patterning, and multi-patterning doesn’t create feature sizes as sharp or defined as EUV does. The image below shows the difference between using EUV and ArF lasers, with the intended floor plan at the top.
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