Jiwei.com News (Text/Oliver), On August 25, TSMC President Wei Zhejia talked about TSMC's future 4nm process, 3nm process and the new N12e special process at the TSMC technical seminar.
Wei Zhejia pointed out that the upgraded N5 process N5P will be mass-produced in 2021. Just as the N6 process was developed based on the N7 process, TSMC also developed the N4 process based on the N5 process to meet a wide range of downstream product needs.
According to Wei Zhejia, N4 has improved speed, power consumption and density, and has 100% IP compatibility with N5, so it can use N5's existing design infrastructure to accelerate product innovation. N4 will start trial production in the fourth quarter of 2021.
In addition, Wei Zhejia also reported the progress of the N3 process. He said that N3 technology has innovative miniaturization characteristics. Compared with N5, the speed can be increased by 15%, the power is reduced by 30%, and the logic density is increased by 70%. N3 is expected to be trial production in 2021 and enter mass production in the second half of 2022.
Wei Zhejia also revealed that TSMC is working closely with customers to define the specifications and progress of the next node after N3.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to advanced logic processes, TSMC also has complete special process technologies, including MEMS, CMOS image sensor, Non-Volatile Memory (NVM), RF, BCD power, etc. Wei Zhejia said that special processes play a key role in realizing human-computer interaction, human perception and action capabilities, and the expansion of the above capabilities has greatly increased the demand for semiconductors for various networked devices. Today, in addition to being connected to the Internet, the edge devices you carry with you must also have more intelligent processing of large amounts of data. The semiconductor technologies used by these networked edge devices have put forward huge demands for low power consumption.
In response to the above-mentioned low-power consumption needs, TSMC has recently launched the N12e technology, which further improves power efficiency without sacrificing speed and logic density. According to Wei Zhejia, N12e supports ultra-low leakage equipment and ultra-low VDD designs, which can be as low as below 0.4V. N12e will bring more positive changes in smart IoT, mobile devices and other product applications.
(Proofreading/zero three)
