TSMC to speed up development of 10nm process

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 07/10/2014 08:40 AM | source: | 7 comment(s)

To counter Samsung that is. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plans to speed up the development of its 10nm process to fend off competition from Samsung Electronics, which reportedly has landed 14nm FinFET chip orders from Qualcomm, according to industry sources.

TSMC and Samsung are currently competing fiercely in the development of FinFET process, with the Korea-based foundry house utilizing a 14nm process and TSMC a 16nm node. Both the 14nm and 16nm processes are scheduled to enter volume production in early 2015.

TSMC has been pioneering the development of the FinFET technology and originally planned to begin producing 16nm FinFET chips in the fourth quarter of 2014, said the sources.

Nevertheless, TSMC has rescheduled the commercial production of 16nm FinFET process, and instead plans to roll out a more advanced 16nm FinFET Plus process, which will consume less power and further reduce die sizes.

However, Samsung's development of its 14nm process has been faster than what TSMC has thought, pushing the Taiwan-based foundry house to accelerate the development of the 10nm technology in order to maintain its lead, commented the sources.

proFits
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#4869970 Posted on: 07/10/2014 03:36 PM

Better late than never.....

k3vst3r
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#4869973 Posted on: 07/10/2014 03:40 PM

An yet both trail Intel in the field

sykozis
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#4870077 Posted on: 07/10/2014 05:21 PM

Better late than never.....

Only if they can produce better yields as a result....

Fox2232
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#4870092 Posted on: 07/10/2014 05:36 PM

Intel is still at 22nm. 14nm CPUs will be available in December 2014 to market.
Therefore if other factories get volume production of 14/16nm and its variants early 2015. I would not call it trailing / being late.
Especially since we do not even know if this time it is true 14nm on intel side as they have quite history.
And honestly power efficiency of TSMC/GloFo 28nm is now very close to intel's 22nm.
It's just AMD failing to deliver proper IPC therefore have to clock those CPUs outside of process efficient spots just to be competitive performance wise.

And another place where AMD fails horribly is number of transistors per x86_64 CPU core.

You can just check how many more transistors AMD needs per x86_64 core compared to intel and how much higher IPC on intel's side is.

Then you find that if intel built-up CPU in TSMC's 28nm instead of their 22nm it would not only be 50% cheaper (price vs transistor count is around 2x higher on intel side than AMD), but it would maybe eat bit less energy on certain lower clocks. Unless clocked too high as intel's process have sweet spots at bit higher frequency than TSMC.

Musouka
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#4872229 Posted on: 07/13/2014 04:30 AM

Can we get those 20nm products out there first? Even the new nVidia cards are said to be 28nm for the first patch.

sykozis
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#4872231 Posted on: 07/13/2014 04:36 AM

And it's rumored that NVidia may skip 20nm all together.

Musouka
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#4872242 Posted on: 07/13/2014 05:30 AM

But the 16nm won't be available this year.

Maybe we will see that with the GTX900 series?

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