Despite the financial setbacks due to the terrible situation involving the Galaxy Note 7, Samsung and their wholly owned subsidiary, Samsung Semiconductors, are moving forward with their 10nm node process. In fact, they’re right on schedule for that and it’s entering mass production as of today.
Oooh, so pretty!
Samsung is first out the gate with full 10nm production
Being in production now means that companies looking to use 10nm on their next-generation SoC’s and in devices for the next year can begin placing orders and even hae them fulfilled. This’ll pave the way for even lower-power devices that have much better efficiency than their previous 14nm process, which only began mass production in January of 2015.
Samsung’s 10nm LPE is a FinFET design with 3D transistors that should help to give it a remarkable performance increase, of around 27%, over 14nm. It was expected that the new process would take some time to perfect before being truly ready, but Samsung has overcome some of the technical limitations with a few bleeding edge technologies, or so they’re saying. They’re quoting up to 40% lower power consumption and 30% increase in area efficiency to grant higher performing designs using the same physical area. It’ll be exciting to see just who uses their process, as they’re also competing with TSMC, who is also expected to ramp up their own 10nm process by the end of the year.