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It is said that it will cost as much as $600M to develop a 5nm chip. At that price, only a few companies can afford to play, and with that amount of cash in, innovation is severely limited.
At the same time, there is a stampede in the artificial intelligence (AI) market where around 60 startups have appeared, many of which have already … Read More
Hardware is roaring back into prominence in technology innovation, from advanced cars to robots, smart homes and smart cities, 5G communication and the burgeoning electronification of industry, medicine and utilities. While software continues to play a role, all of these capabilities depend fundamentally on advances in … Read More
Samsung and TSMC have both made recent disclosures about their 5nm process and I though it would be a good time to look at what we know about them and compare the two processes.
A lot of what has been announced about 5nm is in comparison to 7nm so we will first review 7nm.
7nm
Figure 1 compares Samsung’s 7LPP process to TSMC’s 7FF and 7FFP… Read More
TSMC recently held their annual Technology Symposium in Santa Clara. Part 1 of this article focused on the semiconductor process highlights. This part reviews the advanced packaging technologies presented at the symposium.
TSMC has clearly made a transition from a “pure” wafer-level foundry to a supplier of complex integrated… Read More
Each year, TSMC conducts two major customer events worldwide – the TSMC Technology Symposium in the Spring and the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum in the Fall. The Technology Symposium event was recently held in Santa Clara, CA, providing an extensive update on the status of advanced semiconductor and packaging… Read More
This year TSMC did a FinFET victory lap with the success of 16nm, 12nm, 10nm, and 7nm. It really is well deserved. Even though TSMC credits the ecosystem and customers, I credit TSMC and their relationship with Apple since it has pushed us all much harder than ever before. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei summed it up nicely in his keynote: Innovation,… Read More
It’s no coincidence that the TSMC Symposium is right after the Q1 earnings call. This will allow TSMC to talk more freely and they certainly will, my opinion. It is a very interesting time in the semiconductor industry and TSMC, being the bellwether, can tell us what will happen the rest of the year and give us some 2020 insights.… Read More
TSMC and Samsung continue to raise the competitive bar for FinFET foundry market share with dueling announcements this week. As I mentioned previously in the blog Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019, FinFETs are the market to watch with the coming onslaught of 5G and AI chips on the edge, in the cloud, and in our autonomous… Read More
Last week TSMC announced the availability of its complete 5nm design infrastructure that enables SoC designers to implement advanced mobile and high-performance computing applications for the emerging 5G and AI driven markets. This fifth generation 3D FinFET design infrastructure includes technology files, PDKs (Process… Read More
The semiconductor foundry landscape changed in 2018 when GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Intel paused their leading edge foundry efforts. Intel quietly told partners they would no longer pursue the foundry business and GF publicly shut down their 7nm process development and pivoted towards existing process nodes while trimming headcount… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot