Published in PC Hardware

ARM and TSMC plan 10nm FinFET

by on02 October 2014



64-bit ARM of course

Since Apple surprised many with its 20nm A8 chip, ARM is answering with 10nm FinFET (or 10FinFET), a manufacturing process that comes after 16nm FinFET or 16FinFET as TSMC calls it.

16FitFET becomes interesting as you can stack 3D memory on chips such as the Pascal GPU that Nvidia plans for 2016. Samsung and GlobalFoundries are planning 14nm chips for customers like Apple, Qualcomm and AMD among others and TSMC had to do better than that.

This is just a multiyear cooperation agreement as it takes literary years from day one of development to the first commercial product. If a company starts designing a 10FinFET chip today, with a lot of luck it can finish in two year time, so sometime in late 2016. We are not sure if the process will be ready at that time, but ARM and TSMC will have the design libraries and probably prototype chips long before then.

ARM and TSMC hope that this announcement can result in 10FinFET designs as early as Q4 2015, which again falls within 2016 at the earliest for volume production and commercial availability. TSMC will use the knowledge it gains with 20nm SoC production that it currently does for Apple and some other companies, including Qualcomm. Later on it will gain additional experience from the 16FinFET process.

A technique called CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate) helps TSMC to be able to combine different process nodes on a single substrate. We saw this before from TSMCs competitors including GlobalFoundries.

"TSMC has continuously been the lead foundry to introduce advanced process technology for ARM-based SoCs," said Dr. Cliff Hou, TSMC vice president of R&D. "Together with ARM, we proved out in silicon the high performance and low power of the big.LITTLE architecture as implemented in 16FinFET. Given the successful adoption of our previous collaborative efforts, it makes sense that we continue this fruitful partnership with ARM in future 64-bit cores and 10FinFET."

Intel has been researching how to get to 6nm and beyond and it is quite certain that the future brings smaller transistors, less power consumption and more powerful SoCs and big core processors.

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