htmlOn October 26, Alphawave said it had already cut one of the first chips in the industry to use TSMC's second-generation 3nm manufacturing technology and successfully passed all necessary tests, which will be displayed on TSMC's OIP forum later this week.
(Picture from Alphawave IP)
The first chip built with TSMC's second-generation 3nm process is the Alphawave IP ZeusCORE100 1-112Gbps NRZ/PAM4 serializer-deserializer, supporting a variety of standards that will be popular and popular in the next few years, including 800G Ethernet, OIF 112G-CEO, PCle 6.0 and CXL3.0. The chip is very common in the field of high-speed data transmission. It is an interface circuit for high-speed data transmission. This chip is often used in data centers.
TSMC plans to launch up to five 3nm-level process technologies in the next 2-3 years. The first generation of 3nm processes is expected to be used by major customers Apple for a few chip designs, and the second generation of N3E are more mature, which means that large-scale mass production can be achieved, and has higher performance and lower power consumption.
(Picture from TSMC official)
According to Xiao Lei, the application scope of N3E will be larger than that of N3, but large-scale mass production will have to wait until mid-2023 or the third quarter of 2023, about one year after TSMC's large-scale mass production. After that, TSMC will add three more 3nm nodes, such as performance-oriented N3P, N3S for higher transistor density, and N3X for products such as microprocessors.
On the 3nm process node, TSMC is indeed a little slower than Samsung . The latter uses GAA FET to achieve "overtaking on the curve" and takes the lead in mass production, while the former still polishes the Fin FET process. , but Samsung's 3nm mass production progress is not that ideal, and it is not yet able to achieve large-scale mass production, and the yield rate is pitifully low. Xiao Lei believes that under this circumstance, TSMC, which has been steady and steady, still has a chance to keep up with Samsung.
(Picture from Pixabay)
Now the wafer manufacturing process is becoming more and more so every time you cross a node forward, the time it takes is longer than the previous process. As the next technology node, the application time will be longer. In the short term, we will not see a large number of 3nm chips going on the market. All of this will have to be prepared for mass production by wafer foundry and the chip design plan is in place.
(cover image from Pixabay)
