Samsung and TSMC Roadmaps: 8 and 6 nm Added, Looking at 22ULP and 12FFC
by Anton Shilov on May 5, 2017 9:30 AM ESTNot Everyone Needs Leading Edge: TSMC’s 22 nm ULP, 12 nm FFC and 12 nm FFC+
Now let’s discuss something less advanced, but what is required for hundreds of millions of devices sold every year.
Advertised PPA Improvements of TSMC's Low-Power/Compact Nodes Data announced by TSMC during conference calls, press briefings and in press releases |
||||||||
CLN28HPC vs CLN28HPM |
CLN28HPC+ vs CLN28HPM |
CLN22LPU vs CLNHPC+ |
CLN16FFC vs CLN16FF |
CLN12FFC vs CLN16FFC |
12FFC-ULP vs CLN12FFC |
|||
Power | 20% | 30% | 35% | lower | 25% | lower | ||
Performance | - | 15% | 15% | unknown | 10% | unknown | ||
Area Reduction | 10% | 10% | 10% | optional | 20% | unknown | ||
HVM Start | started | started | 2018 | Q1 2016 | 2018 | 2019 | ||
Note | Planar 28 nm-based |
FinFET 16/20 nm-based |
Development of FinFET-based chips is more expensive of ICs featuring planar transistors and their manufacturing is more costly as well. As a result, FinFET is virtually unavailable for many smaller designers of SoCs that usually build various solutions for emerging IoT applications. GlobalFoundries and Samsung offer their FD-SOI manufacturing processes to such companies (and these technologies have a number of other advantages in addition to being more cost-effective), whereas TSMC intends to introduce its new 22 nm ULP technology aimed at such applications. The CLN22ULP is an optimized version of the company’s 28 nm HPC+ (high-performance compact plus) manufacturing process that has been available for a while. The 22ULP offers a 10% area reduction and either a 15% performance improvement over the 28HPC+ process, or a 35% power drop. The 22ULP process joins a family of other ultra-low-power processes offered by TSMC and will compete against GlobalFoundries 22FDX as well as Samsung’s 28 nm FD-SOI offering.
Next up is TSMC’s 12 nm FFC manufacturing technology, which is an optimized version of the company’s CLN16FFC that is set to use 6T libraries (as opposed to 7.5T and 9T libraries) providing a 20% area reduction. Despite noticeably higher transistor density, the CLN12FFC is expected to also offer a 10% frequency improvement at the same power and complexity or a 25% power reduction at the same clock rate and complexity. Further down the road, TSMC also plans to offer a ULP version of the CLN12FFC with reduced voltage, but that is going to happen only in 2018 or 2019.
Sources: Samsung, TSMC, SemiWiki (1, 2, 3).
Related Reading:
- Samsung Foundry Announces 10nm SoC In Mass-Production
- Samsung Announces Second-Gen 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP) Process Now In Mass Production
- EUV Lithography Makes Good Progress, Still Not Ready for Prime Time
- GlobalFoundries to Expand Capacities, Build a Fab in China
- Intel to Equip Fab 42 for 7 nm
- GlobalFoundries Updates Roadmap: 7 nm in 2H 2018, EUV Sooner Than Later?
89 Comments
View All Comments
SuperMecha - Saturday, May 6, 2017 - link
“First of all, neither he, or anyone else outside those companies actually knows enough about the actual chips to know the true density.”That’s grossly false. Their customers (i.e. AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc.) need to have the PDKs to design their chips. The PDKs will contain the design rules and ultimately the transistor specifications necessary to design a chip for that process. TSMC will be accepting 7nm tape outs this quarter which means the transistor specifications were likely frozen some time ago. Never mind the fact that the companies have released details of their future process nodes.
Wilco1 - Sunday, May 7, 2017 - link
I guess you also don't believe then that both TSMCs and GF's 16/14nm processes are already denser than Intel's 14nm? See eg. http://www.anandtech.com/show/11170/the-amd-zen-an... Apple A8 on 20nm was shown to be much denser than Core M on 14nm.Whatever the marketing claims say, Intel is already behind on density in actual designs. Intel's latest 14nm process is even less dense. So what makes you think that Intel could catch up?
melgross - Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - link
Because what you're saying is wrong. I haven't read anything saying that intels's process is less dense.Wilco1 - Thursday, May 11, 2017 - link
Well the link I provided shows it very clearly - I presume you didn't read it?Intel may have better CPP/MP/FP/SRAM at 14nm vs TSMC/GF, but AMD still gets better L2 and L3 density despite the less advanced process. And density on real designs matters more than the process marketing numbers (which are about bragging rights, but don't tell the whole story).
lefty2 - Sunday, May 7, 2017 - link
Scott's analysis was actually spot on. Dick James of TechInsights actually measured Samsungs 10nm chip: https://twitter.com/Siliconicsdick/status/85632866...measuring a 68 mm contacted gate pitch, 51 nm metal pitch, dual STI and single dummy gate.
That's compared to Intel's 14nm of 70 nm CPP x 52 nm MMP
By comparison: Intel's 14nm is 70 nm CPP x 52 nm MMP.
sc14s - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
Seems to me past 2025 or so what are they going to do to compete assuming you hit that ~5nm and then iterate a few times on that process to maximize it's potential?You can't really go any further without some major physics breakthrough. it's kinda a race to the bottom just in a physics sense instead of the financial price slashing sense.
melgross - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
Most of the work has been with carbon nanotubes, with both IBM and Hp showing progress. But it's not expected to go commercial (if ever, really) before the mid 2020s, or possibly (more likely), the later part of the decade.So there will be a gap. Software developers will need to improve their software to improve performance finally, which should be a big benefit for everything.
bji - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
Regular hardware speed increases have allowed more software to be produced across a broader range of products more quickly because developers don't have to spend their time optimizing for performance as much because the hardware gets them to a 'good enough' place easily. Once the hardware is not getting faster, for every problem that requires greater performance, you simply shift more of the cost of creating the product to the software side. It will take longer to produce programs as a result. There is no free lunch; it's not like software development could have for no extra cost added more performance and now that hardware stops increasing in speed software development will just start adding that free performance in. The cost of producing software will just go up for that segment of the software market that is performance sensitive. Of course, quite a lot of the market is not performance sensitive so there will be little appreciable impact on most of the software market.tarqsharq - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
It would be quite the time to be a skilled software developer though.A next generation John Carmack? Using computing tricks to pull off things that traditionally would bog down the available hardware?
vladx - Friday, May 5, 2017 - link
You're assuming that there are real solutions that could revolutionize software performance and scalability, just like the P versus NP problem we might never get an answer to that.