TSMC Has Begun Mass Production Of Chips Built On Its 7nm Process

Some companies may be having a hard time getting their 10 nanometer chips off of the ground, but for Taiwan’s semiconductor giant TSMC, it’s already settling quite comfortably into the new 7nm era. Last week, the company announced that it’s begun high-volume production of 7nm chips, and with “over a dozen” customers with “tens of designs” waiting around, TSMC continues to have its work cut out for it.

Compared to the CLN16FF+ technology (16nm FinFET), CLN7FF drops die sizes by 70%, and power consumption by 60% (or, a 30% boost to performance could be enjoyed instead). By the end of the year, TSMC expects to have 50 7nm products taped-out, ready for full manufacturing.

One of the greatest things for TSMC is that it’s able to continue using its same tools to craft these new 7nm chips, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be less expensive to create. In fact, some changes will require higher production costs, but fortunately for the companies making these chips, the gains will still be very much worth it (the same goes for the consumer buying the products, as well).

As cool as CLN7FF is, there’s a CLN7FF+ en route (next year, possibly), that aims to increase transistor density by 20%, as well as offer a further 10% drop in power consumption. Whereas the CLN7FF is designed with deep ultraviolet lithography, the + version will upgrade to “extreme” DUV (EUV).

TSMC has said that it has many customers lining up for 7nm, and it seems very likely that some CPUs and GPUs we’ll be dealing with next year will be packing billions of these new super-small transistors. There are surely going to be many CPU and GPU announcements before next year, but clearly, it seems the 7nm move is going to have the greatest chance of “wowing” us at this point – especially if they’ll be coupled with new architectures. With a chip like the Ryzen 7 2700X built on 12nm and performing as well as it does, I love the idea of Zen 2, with both its further optimized architecture and 7nm process… it sounds dreamy.