Race to 14-nanometer technology



To the production technology for transistors with 14 nm wide structures, a race has developed, at least in press releases concerns. It is not always clear at what stage of development are the respective companies and exactly when the first semiconductor devices with 14-nanometer structures actually occur in final products that can be purchased at retail. Also, the characteristics of the different manufacturing processes are hardly comparable.

At Intel, it was clear that after running this year 22-nm process technology, the 14-nm technology is applied; probably Broadwell processors come with 14-nm structures in 2014 the market.




The world's largest contract manufacturer TSMC had mentioned 14-nm process technology as early as 2010 and early 2011 announced that they wanted to use them as "2015 or 2016" on wafers of 450 mm diameter. While Intel relies on multi-gate or "3D" transistors, TSMC speaks like most other chip shop of FinFETs. Which may have great importance, when "14 nm", the effective gate length of the transistors, it is meant that dimension that is specified is not readily comparable to the case of planar transistors.

After Globalfoundries had in June by the "uncertain 14-nm node," spoken, the second largest contract manufacturer surprised in September with the announcement of wanting FinFETs finished with 14Nm XM technology from 2014. It wants Globalfoundries benefit from the "maturity" of the "modern" 20-nanometer technology, which also surprised because so far not even products with 28-nm chips will be added in the manufacturing of Globalfoundries to be available. The delivery of 20-nm chips GlobalFoundries has not been announced. In 14-nm planar transistors XM will also be provided with 20-nm structures.

UMC had reported in July, taken out of the self-developed process for 20-nm planar transistors also technology for 20-nm FinFETs by IBM under license. In November UMC then announced develop based on these 20-nm technology from IBM for 14-nm FinFETs. How this approach can be compared with the Globalfoundries and expire when this production technology is, is still unclear.

End of October, Cadence had announced that IBM has completed a test chip with ARM Cortex-M0 with 14-nm FinFET s on FD-SOI wafers. Again, no specific timetable for series production was announced.

Now, Samsung has finally registered in the 14-nm-Club. Together with ARM, Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys you have implemented the tape-out of several test chips with Cortex-A7 cores and SRAM cells successfully. The tape-out does not mean that these components have been successfully produced.

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