TSMC Unveils 6-nanometer Process

[btarunr]

TSMC today announced its 6-nanometer (N6) process, which provides a significant enhancement of its industry-leading N7 technology and offers customers a highly competitive performance-to-cost advantage as well as fast time-to-market with direct migration from N7-based designs. By leveraging the new capabilities in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography gained from the N7+ technology currently in risk production, TSMC's N6 process delivers 18% higher logic density over the N7 process. At the same time, its design rules are fully compatible with TSMC's proven N7 technology, allowing its comprehensive design ecosystem to be reused. As a result, it offers a seamless migration path with a fast design cycle time with very limited engineering resources for customers to achieve the product benefits from the new technology offering.

Scheduled for risk production in the first quarter of 2020, TSMC's N6 technology provides customers with additional cost-effective benefits while extending the industry-leading power and performance from the 7nm family for a broad array of applications, ranging from high-to-mid end mobile, consumer applications, AI, networking, 5G infrastructure, GPU, and high-performance computing.

"TSMC N6 technology will further extend our leadership in delivering product benefits with higher performance and cost advantage beyond the current N7," said Dr. Kevin Zhang, TSMC Vice President of Business Development. "Building upon the broad success of our 7nm technology, we're confident that our customers will be able to quickly extract even higher product value from the new offering by leveraging a well-established design ecosystem today."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Vayra86]

N7 technology, Shepard eat your heart out. Marketing's a beautiful thing

 

[MDDB]

The previous article said that the N7+ process would get a +20% in density compared to N7, while this article says that N6 would have 18% better density than N7. Anybody care to clarify it? As written, it suggests that N6 is worse than N7+..?

 

[64K]

I haven't run across anything about 6nm silicon. I wonder if this will be available for 3xxx GPUs?

 

[lexluthermiester]

I wonder if this will be available for 3xxx GPUs?

Maybe. RTX 3xxx is still a ways off.

 

[medi01]

They call it 7+, we call it N6.

But actually, 7+ sounds cooler.

 

[king of swag187]

6 is bigger than 5, so its obviously better

 

[64K]

Maybe. RTX 3xxx is still a ways off.

I expect the 3xxx series next year when Intel launches their own GPUs.

One thing I've heard for years now is that it's getting increasingly expensive to continue going to lower process nodes. My concern is that PC gaming may shrink when people needing to upgrade look at the prices. It's $500 to $550 for a midrange card right now when a console is $400.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I expect the 3xxx series next year when Intel launches their own GPUs.

One thing I've heard for years now is that it's getting increasingly expensive to continue going to lower process nodes. My concern is that PC gaming may shrink when people needing to upgrade look at the prices. It's $500 to $550 for a midrange card right now when a console is $400.

Part of the problem is we(in reference to the IC industry) are getting close to the limitation of the laws of physics in size and the challenges/costs are only going to get worse until we design a new/better substrate material, IE move away from silicon. There are a number of elements in the metalliod group that would work well as a replacement. Arsenic is very workable, but toxic. Tellerium would be an excellent replacement functionally, but has a very low melting point and is more expensive.