Samsung has ready 8nm process for economical chips
Samsung has completed the development of its 8LPP process for chip production. Chips that the manufacturer will produce based on the technology are more economical and smaller in size than 10LPP versions.
The 8nm finfet process, to which Samsung links the designation ‘low power plus’, is intended for chips for mobile, crypto mining and network and server products, the Korean manufacturer reports. The node is up to ten percent more energy efficient and provides a reduction of the chip surface size of ten percent compared to the current 10LPP process. This is due to the narrowing of the metal pitch, the distance between the metal contact lines, or interconnects, through which the electrons flow and sit on either side of the transistors.
Samsung expects production to pick up speed quickly, as it uses the same technology as that used for 10LPP. Furthermore, the company claims that the qualification of 8LPP is three months ahead of schedule.
Samsung does not seem to be able to use the process yet for making its upcoming Exynos processor for a possible Galaxy S9. It will probably be made at 10LPP. At the beginning of this year, Samsung announced that mass production of 10LPP would start at the end of this year. The question is also what the differences are between 8LPP and the 10LPU announced last year, which also had to reduce the surface area of chips. Maybe it’s just a name change. Anyway, the names chip manufacturers give to their nodes are confusing. On SemiWiki, among others, there are attempts to give a realistic overview of nodes based on the most important properties, although the latest announcements have not yet been incorporated.
Samsung promises to provide more details about 8LPP during its Foundry Forum, which will take place in Munich on Wednesday. There, the company will also announce more about the 7nm node, for which Samsung will use euv chip machines. Intel and GlobalFoundries, for their part, will reveal more details about their respective 10nm and 7nm processes at the International Electron Devices Meeting in December. That writes EETimes.