TSMC, a semiconductor manufacturing giant in Taiwan has announced a new 6-nanometer (N6) process for the manufacture of mobile phone processors. A great enhancement is provided by the new 6nm process in an industry which is led by 7nm technology. The new 6nm process also provides customers with a highly competitive performance-to-cost advantage as well as fast time-to-market with direct migration from designs which were based on the N7.
Capabilities of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography gained from the N7+ technology will be significantly leveraged by the new 6nm technology. TSMC recently announced its N7+ process. The process which involves the incorporation of EUV on TSMC’s 7nm is said to have entered risk production and it will be used on Hisilicon Kirin 985.
With the new 6nm process comes an 18% higher logic density over the 7nm process. Even though the new 6nm process has design rules that are fully compatible with TSMC’s proven N7 technology, it still boasts a higher logic density. This lets it reuse it’s comprehensive design ecosystem thereby enabling it to have a seamless migration path with a fast design cycle time. The engineering resources needed to push this new process out to customers are also very limited, thus it will be a cost-effective upgrade. The process also features many cost-effective benefits such as improvement in AI, consumer applications, networking, 5G infrastructure, GPU, and high-performance computing. The best part is that it does all these while extending the industry-leading power and performance from the 7nm family.
