TSMC to start production of 16nm Finfet chips in Q2 2015

TSMC will start production of 16nm chips in the second quarter of 2015, while the company is only just making the switch to 20nm. The company would be a quarter ahead of its schedule. In 2016, the chip company wants to start with 10nm production.

TSMC provided an explanation of the upcoming production nodes when presenting its quarterly results. At the end of 2015, 16nm chips should account for between 7 and 9 percent of sales and by 2017, the majority of sales should come from 16nm chips. This year, TSMC wants to realize 60 tapeouts of 16nm chips, or to produce test chips. In September, TSMC already made a functioning 20nm finfet-soc. The current test chips can be clocked up to 2.3GHz and could reach an idle consumption of 75mW, EETimes writes based on the TSMC explanation.

The move to smaller production processes enables faster and more economical processors such as SOCs for smartphones and tablets. The recent performance gains of Apple’s A8 and A8X SOCs, for example, are in large part due to the move to 20nm transistors. That 20nm production made up 9 percent of TSMC’s sales in the third quarter, compared to 34 percent for the established 28nm production. TSMC is engaged in a battle with Samsung, which is working on 14nm finfet chips together with Globalfoundries. Samsung will also start production of those chips in 2015. In short, Finfet is a transistor type with a larger gate surface, comparable to Intel’s trigate transistors. This should ensure more efficient transistors and make it possible to switch to smaller processes.

Incidentally, the socs for mobile applications will first make the switch to smaller production processes, other chips such as GPUs will follow later. It will also be some time before TSMC will start using the chip machines of ASML’s new EUV generation. Even the 10nm production will still be based on immersion lithography, using cost-increasing multi-patterning processes.