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Hackbraten
> The country also has 300-mm equipment purchased from AMD's fab near Dresden in the early 2000s.

That’s quite an impressive process size.

chupasaurus
Micron (the makers of those chips) has a 90nm process fab since 2011.
bigdict
> 300-mm

It's a typo, you can't make a usable chip out of foot long transistors :)

mohanmcgeek
The article mentions Mikron.

Micron seems to be the US company that we might be familiar with.

I guess they're different companies

rubatuga
Discrete transistors would be better at that point
jepler
It probably refers to the size of the whole wafer.
elihu
I think most of the "feature sizes" that Charles Babbage worked with were smaller than that.

300mm is actually a standard wafer size. I think that's what most modern fabs use now; there was some push to move to 450, but I think the major players have all determined it to be more trouble than it's worth for now. I don't keep up-to-date on these sorts of things though so maybe 450mm wafers are used for some significant products now.

That said, the wafer size doesn't really tell you anything about how advanced their lithography is.

mhh__
650 tonnes of difference engine ought to be enough for anyone.
tantony
That's vacuum tube territory.
SikoKinesis
In the article they say it would have a long lifespan, but being a 32bit chip wouldn't the 2038 problem affect it?
josephcsible
No. You can have a 64-bit time_t even with a 32-bit word size.
lloydatkinson
A 4 bit CPU could model time between year 0 and 10,000 if so wished. It depends on the number of bytes you use. The width is irrelevant.