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)

The post TSMC starts working on 5nm Apple A14 chip infrastructure appeared first on Gizmochina.

IBM has announced that it has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of a process to build silicon nanosheet transistor which would enable the manufacture of 5nm chips. The process which is an industry first was developed in collaboration with its research alliance partners Global Foundries and Samsung. Although details of the process employed in the manufacture are yet to be revealed, it won’t be long before we’ll get to find that out. IBM will unveil the process at te 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits Conference in Kyoto, Japan.

When the 7nm node manufacturing process capable of housing 20billion transistors was developed less that two years ago, it would ordinarily have been thought to be a revolutionary process. We are yet to even see a processor built on the 7nm process and now we have a 5nm chip which would enable even more transistors (up to 30 billion switches) on a smaller silicon wafer. The new chip is just about the size of a fingernail. When also compared to the 10nm which is the leading edge technology presently available in the market, the 5nm technology is capable of delivering 40 percent performance enhancement at fixed power, or 75 percent power savings at matched performance.

Read More: OPPO R11 Gets the Video Treatment Showcasing Its New Design In Silver

More transistors will translate to an increase in performance which would help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, AI systems and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The chips would also be able to manage power up to two to three times more efficiently. This power savings property means smartphones’ batteries and those of other mobile products could last two to three times longer than the models availabe presently, before needing to be charged.

The research team achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology. It is not known when this technological breakthrough will reach the point where it can be commercialised as it has only been shown to be possible. We are yet to even see smartphones with chips built on the 7nm process. However, IBM thinks its commercialization is not too far off in the future.

(source)

The post IBM Makes 5nm Chips Possible, Two To Three Times Better Battery Life! appeared first on Gizmochina.