Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has announced the release of its 5nm chip design infrastructure. With the shrinking size, the company is touting improved processor performance as well as improved battery life and thermal management.
It’s noteworthy that TSMC has been Apple‘s only supplier for the company’s A-series chipsets since 2016. According to the reports, all the orders of the A10 Fusion, A11 Bionic, and A12 Bionic chipsets were fulfilled by TSMC.
Announcing this development, TSMC said in a statement: “Compared with TSMC’s 7nm process, its innovative scaling features deliver 1.8X logic density and 15% speed gain on an ARM® Cortex®-A72 core, along with superior SRAM and analog area reduction enabled by the process architecture. The 5nm process enjoys the benefits of process simplification provided by EUV lithography and is making excellent progress in yield learning, achieving the best technology maturity at the same corresponding stage as compared to TSMC’s previous nodes.”
Thus, TSMC is now expected to continue being the only supplier for Apple for its future iPhone models. This could mean that Apple can move forward with producing 5nm A-series chipset for the future iPhone models and we could see it in as early as 2020 iPhones.
The 5nm process is already said to be in preliminary risk production and the chipmaker is planning to invest around $25 billion towards volume production by 2020. As for the iPhone models launching this year, reports indicate that the company will be using a new A13 processor, which will be manufactured using the 7nm+ process.
TSMC has been gradually shrinking the size of its dies over the years as it continues to refine its manufacturing process. The A10 Fusion is 16nm, the A11 Bionic is 10nm, and the A12 Bionic is 7nm.
Read More: Apple’s A13 chip production will commence in the second quarter of this year, says TSMC
And it’s not only TSMC as Qualcomm has also done a good job of bridging the gap between its flagship Snapdragon processors and the A-series chips not only in performance as well as continually-shrinking chip processes. So, we won’t be surprised to see a 5nm Snapdragon chipset soon after the debut of Apple’s 5nm chip.
(Source)
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