[_yosefk]

Don't ask me, it was mostly luck in my case. In general I think in chips even more than elsewhere you want to work at a small place to get big responsibilities quickly, and from that angle, right now doesn't look like a great time to enter the industry, since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they used to be in bulk CMOS and so the expected payout needed to justify risking the capital went up a lot, so less projects starting small. Maybe if node shrinks stop and mask costs go back down and people will start making plenty of specialized lower-volume chips since you won't be able to win just by shrinking high-volume architectures, it will be a good time to enter the industry again.

[trsohmers]

> "... since FinFET mask costs are 10x what they used to be in bulk CMOS"

Not true, it is closer to 2 to 3x, and it is (slowly) getting cheaper. While it will take a long time (~3 years) for 14/16nm FinFET processes to reach price parity with what 28nm is now, it is dropping in price faster than when the 28nm generation came out due to the massive volumes of Apple, NVIDIA, etc.

It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.

[phkahler]

>> It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.

Is that because it's essentially the last planar node? IIRC 20nm kinda sucked for both planar and FinFET so 28 is the last planar and 14/16 is looking like a long term node as well. Is that why you think 28 will be a mainstay?

I'm seeing 28,14 and 7 as pretty much stable and widespread over the next 10 years, with 14 and 7 being significant for cost/perf and cost/density reasons.