TSMC wants to start exploring 10nm process in 2015

TSMC plans to begin exploring the possibility of producing ARM processors at 10nm by the end of 2015. Currently, the manufacturer is at 20nm. The production of 10nm processors will probably start in a few years.

For the 10nm process, TSMC is working with ARM to find the best physical design for SOCs, says the chip maker. The FinFet processors will be based on ARM’s 64-bit microarchitectures Cortex A57 and Cortex A53, which are already in use for, for example, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 soc in several recent smartphones and the upcoming socs from Qualcomm and MediaTek, among others.

Currently TSMC produces socs at 28nm and 20nm; it uses the latter process, for example, for the Apple A8-soc from the iPhone 6. In the foreseeable future, it wants to switch to 16nm as an intermediate step to the 10nm process. ExtremeTech notes that at the start of development in early 2015, the first 10nm socs are likely to appear in 2017 or 2018.