Yesterday, TSMC announced the first successful production of a 32-core ARM chip based on 16nm FinFET technology. According to the foundry, it collaborated with HiSilicon technologies to create the network processor, which marries a 16nm 32-core ARM Cortex-A57 with 28nm logic and I/O chips — this 16nm/28nm combination is produced using a technique TSMC calls CoWoS (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate).
Normally, combining products built on separate substrates and process nodes would require a larger process and separate substrate blocks as shown below. CoWoS allows two different process nodes to be combined on a single substrate — this allows for a smaller overall package size.
So, what does TSMC say about its 16nm FinFET? Quite a number of things. According to the foundry, the HiSilicon device has twice the gate density of 28nm HPM, is 40% faster at the same power consumption, or can reduce power consumption by 60% at the same speed.
“We are delighted to see TSMC’s FinFET technology and CoWoS solution successfully bringing our innovative designs to working silicon,” said HiSilicon President Teresa He. “This industry’s first 32-core ARM Cortex-A57 processor we developed for next-generation wireless communications and routers is based on the ARMv8 architecture with processing speeds of up to 2.6GHz.”
An important milestone, but no roadmap-changer
The announcement from HiSilicon (a division of Huawei) is important in the grand scheme of things because it means that TSMC is now building real hardware on 16nm FinFETs. What it doesn’t signal, however, is any grand change to the overall roadmap or product timing. HiSilicon hasn’t formally launched any products around its new networking SoC because the chip and node still aren’t in true volume production. This is early risk production — the time when getting working silicon is still a big deal, as opposed to being ramped up and ready to ship millions of devices a month. There’s no word on when HiSilicon intends to actually ship its next-gen product, though the company is claiming performance increases of up to 3x when it finally does so. As of today, we don’t expect devices to start shipping with 16nm FinFETs at TSMC before 2016, though it’s possible that we’ll see some small volumes before then.
TSMC’s 20nm business, meanwhile, continues to ramp with Apple’s A8 in full production and chips expected from multiple high profile partners, including Qualcomm, in the first half of 2015.
Source http://www.extremetech.com
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