Chinese Foundry SMIC Begins 14nm Production

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extremetech.com, Aug. 19, 2019 – 

One of the longstanding trends in semiconductor manufacturing has been a steady decrease in major foundry players. Twenty years ago, when 180nm manufacturing was cutting-edge technology, there were no fewer than 28 firms deploying the node. Today, there are three companies building 7nm technology – Samsung, TSMC, and Intel. A fourth, GlobalFoundries, has since quit the cutting-edge business to focus on specialty foundry technologies like its 22nm and 12nm FDX technology.

What sometimes gets lost in this discussion, however, is the existence of a secondary group of foundry companies that do deploy new nodes – just not at the cutting-edge of technological research. China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) has announced that it will begin recognizing 14nm revenue from volume production by the end of 2019, a little more than five years after Intel began shipping on this node. TSMC, Samsung, and GlobalFoundries all have extensive 14nm capability in production, as does UMC, which introduced the node in 2017.

Secondary sources for a node, like UMC and SMIC, often aren't captured in comparative manufacturing charts like the one below because the companies in question offer these nodes after they've been deployed as cutting-edge products by major foundries. In many cases, they're tapped by smaller customers with products that don't make news headlines.

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