[Zenst]

Interesting as 28nm closing in on a decade of age - https://omdia.tech.informa.com/OM016176/28nm-to-be-a-long-li...

But yes, many nodes are long lived. So the nodes they are nolonger expanding would of been around one heck of a time and can imagine the equipment to produce current output will have a repair/servicing cost as well as materials that are starting to make smaller nodes more cost effective for them as a manufacturer and may well see legacy older nodes start becoming more expensive for suppliers to access moving forward. Which for some chips, may well prove less suitable or exsisting designs less accomodating to just shrink as from my understanding if you have a 40nm chip design, just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible? Or certainly not as straight forward. Then there would be validation/testing for certification at the customer will need to do and for some chip nodes, that may prove more costly than sticking with the proven existing nodes.

So be interesting how this plays out, not aware of any real stickouts but mindful that for some companies using existing older nodes, things will not be as clear-cut as many will think.

[jjoonathan]

> just running that on 28nm without any changes is not possible?

From what I understand, "node" in this context doesn't look like a printer resolution, it looks like a lego kit of transistors and such that TSMC has tuned to use the layer heights / counts / materials they plan to deposit. Since these details change between nodes, the 2D shapes aren't portable. You have to swap components.

[variaga]

You understand correctly. (Source: 20 years of asic design)

[pbronez]

I'm also interested in the migration costs. Perhaps there will be a market for a migration service... though the TAM on that is probably small enough that it can't support a product-first approach.

[variaga]

Migration services exist today. Almost any of the ASIC backend service companies would take a contract to do a fab port. (Won't be cheap, though)

But these are services, not products. There's no one-size-fits-all way to move design Z from process X to process Y, for arbitrary values of X, Y and Z, nor is there ever likely to be.

And even once it's done, there are still costs to verify and test the results, which isn't cheap either.

[robotnikman]

>And even once it's done, there are still costs to verify and test the results, which isn't cheap either.

I can imagine its even more so in the automotive industry, where there's strict safety regulations and guidelines in place which must be met.

[Zenst]

Yes it certainly does seem like an opertunity for a specialist company to offer a full service, but aspects like that would usualy be handled for node shrink in colaboration with the node provider. But one aspect will be say for example a microicontoller used for sensitive equipment, the level of certification and validation from goverment/mil certification down to Insurance certification (Lloyds of London have a lot of standard in many feilds that have to be ticked from my experience in the Oil industry alone) that can bury many a product. Heck even your CE/FTC certification is not cheap so any changes,such as node size will see that whole process repeated - hence not all chip makers rush for the latest and greatest node as existing work and proven. Equally some equipment may well see issues upon smaller nodes due to the enviromental factors and smaller nodes more susptable to thinks like radiation in which some exotic space particle would be smaller than the node at larger size but smaller may well start to become an issue. Hence many reasons for legacy nodes still in play and utilised.

May well end up in a decade or two in which suppliers end up having to use China or Russia for production as the only way to get access to the nodes they need, and not like things like that not happened before thinking of how NASA for a while was dependant upon old tried and tested Russian rockets for space launches. Just hope this is not a future problem that is allowed to creep up and hit us all.