Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the largest contract chipset manufacturer, has revealed in its earnings conference call that the company is expecting that most of its 7nm “N7” process customers/clients will shift to 6nm “N6” process.
It further adds that the upcoming 6nm “N6” node uses the same design rules as the N7 node, which makes it a lot easier for customers to transition to the newer and denser node. If this prediction of the company comes true, then N6 could be on the path towards becoming another widely-utilized, long-serving process node for the company.
Announced last month, the new 6nm process provides a significant enhancement of its industry-leading 7nm technology and offers customers a highly competitive performance-to-cost advantage as well as fast time-to-market with migration from N7-based designs.
The technology will leverage the capabilities of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography gained from the N7+ technology. TSMC had recently unveiled its N7+ process which involves the incorporation of EUV on TSMC’s 7nm. The process will be used on Hisilicon Kirin 985 and is said to have entered risk production.
As per the company, the new 6nm process delivers 18% higher logic density over the 7nm process. 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 benefits range from improvement in AI, consumer applications, networking, 5G infrastructure, GPU, and high-performance computing.
Read More: TSMC has reportedly started working on a new 5nm infrastructure for the Apple A14 chipset
TSMC’s partners have adopted both N7 and N7+ processes and the company is expecting the two technologies to contribute over 25 percent of its wafer revenue in 2019. Meanwhile, TSMC projects that most of its customers who use N7 today will migrate to N6 and then to N5 skipping the N7+.
(Via)
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