The world’s leading independent founder, TSMC is responsible for engraving processors, GPUs, APUs and other SoCs for many market players, starting with Apple and AMD. To maintain its small technological lead over its main competitors (Samsung Foundry and Intel, not to name them), the Taiwanese giant wants to quickly launch its new 3 nm (N3) engraving protocol… while accelerating R&D work. which will later lead to the adoption of the 2 nm (N2) etching process.
In any case, this is what TSMC mentioned on the sidelines of the presentation of its latest financial results.
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Adopting more advanced burning protocols always means higher performance for the chips that take advantage of them. Generally, these technical advances also make it possible to obtain better energy efficiency, resulting in processors and graphics cards that are more energy efficient… and that heat up less.
New fineness of engraving and new type of transistors by 2024
Our colleagues from Clubic report that TSMC would be able to launch mass production of 3 nm chips towards the end of 2022. At this stage, however, the founder is content to evoke a broader launch window, speaking rather of second half of 2022 without further elaboration. We also learn that an improved version of this “N3” burning protocol would be planned for the beginning of 2023. Nicknamed “NE3”, it would above all allow better performance.
As for the “N2” process, which will introduce the fineness of engraving in 2 nm, TSMC evokes this time a pre-production phase somewhere in 2024, and a large-scale production in 2025. Logically, the engraving in 3 nm should be used fairly quickly by AMD for its future Ryzen 8000 processors, under Zen 5 architecture. Apple, for its part, could be among the first to have the chips of its iPhone, iPad and Mac engraved in 2 nm by 2025.
Beyond the finesse of engraving, TSMC finally plans to change the type of transistors. The arrival of 2 nm in its offer will thus be parallel to the adoption of GAA (Gate All-Around) technology. It will take over from the FinFET transistors used for a very long time at TSMC.