TSMC to spend $25bn in shift to 5nm

TSMC claim follows Samsung reveal of its 7nm process

TSMC has revealed that it plans to invest $25bn making the shift to five nanometre process chip-making technology. However, it hasn't disclosed a time-frame for that investment, nor indicated when it expects to get its first products to market.

It comes in the same week that Samsung gave a detailed look at its 7nm process at the VLSI Symposia in Hawaii. Samsung's technology, according to the specialist site Fudzilla, utilises the extreme ultra-violet (UEV) light technique, which has been in development for 30 years or so.

In contrast, TSMC was able to get to volume production with 7nm products before Samsung using current lithography tools. It expects to tape-out more than 50 designs by the end of the year for more than a dozen customers, according to Fudzilla. These designs are being applied to mobile application processors, server CPUs, GPUs and network processors.

The 5nm process is close to the limits of Moore's law. However, IBM claimed last year to have produced 5nm chips based on a gate-all-round field-effect transister (GAAFET) configuration, as opposed to the more conventional FinFET (fin field-effect transister) design.

In addition, equipment maker IMEC and its rival Cadence claimed this year to have taped out 3nm test chips, while Samsung claims that it could be producing 3nm chips from 2021 using GAAFET technology.

These moves are being made after mass-market smartphone CPUs started shifting to 10nm with, for example, the Samsung-made Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, while the forthcoming 7nm Snapdragon 855 will be made by TSMC.

Intel, though, has struggled to make the jump to 10nm, with its shift repeatedly delayed: it had planned to start mass production of 10nm CPUs with Cannon Lake in 2016.

Cannon Lake is some two years late. Intel had been expected to release products based on the Cannon Lake microarchitecture in 2016 but, although it claims to be shipping 10nm Cannon Lake chips in low-volume, it won't shift to volume production until 2019 at the earliest.

Intel's main rival AMD, meanwhile, has already overtaken it with a large-scale shift to 12nm this year with Ryzen 2, with plans to shift to 10nm for its next generation of Ryzen CPUs early next year.

AMD's CPUs are manufactured by GlobalFoundries, the production arm that it offloaded almost ten years ago.