TSMC Details Silicon Road Map

FinFETs will fly from 16nm to 7nm

By Rick Merritt, EETimes,SAN JOSE, Calif., Mar. 16, 2016 – Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is ramping its 16nm process and making progress on plans to roll out 10 and 7nm nodes over the next two years. The news injected optimism in a crowd of about 1,500 attendees at a Silicon Valley event here where the world's largest independent chip foundry shared its long-sought success with FinFETs and the great unknown beyond.

Some observers were underwhelmed, claiming TSMC's road map to 7nm will only bring it in line with the 14nm process in which Intel is currently ramping its Skylake CPUs.

Indeed, even TSMC executives noted its 10 and 7nm nodes will have minimum feature sizes of about 20 and 14nm, respectively. And they all use the same fundamental FinFET transistor structures Intel pioneered at 22nm and 14nm. However, they also reported significant progress on research on post-FinFET devices.

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