TSMC expects to ship 2nm chips to customers by 2026
This week, TSMC CEO C.C. Wei discussed the foundry’s plans for its 2nm process node known as N2. Wei did confirm that the transistors that TSMC will use with its 2nm components will be gate-all-around (GAA); the company will continue to rely on ASML’s Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography to mark up wafers with the circuitry patterns needed to fit those billions of transistors inside each chip die.
TSMC builds the A15 Bionic chip used by Apple on the iPhone 13 series
The foundry’s top executive added that “Our N2 development is on track, including new transistor structure and progressing to our expectation. All I want to say is that yes, it is [in] the end of 2024 you will enter the risk production. In 2025 it will be in production, probably close to the second half, or you know in the end of 2025. That’s our schedule.”
Despite that two-three year lead for Samsung Foundry, TSMC’s Wei says that its first-generation GAA will be the best technology available. “We expect our N2 […] to be the best technology, [delivering] maturity, performance, and cost for our customers,” said Wei. “We are confident that N2 will continue our technology leadership to support our customer growth.”
Samsung has the early lead in the use of Gate-all-around (GAA) transistor architecture
TSMC still believes that FinFET has a few more years left before it needs to change the architecture of its transistors. TSMC had been updating to a new process node every two years, but that now seems to be stretching out to every three years. It can get away with this by stretching out each node with enhancements, but its competitors appear to be more aggressive and that is typical as the leader in every industry has a target painted on its back.
Talking about Moore’s Law, the observation made by Fairchild and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that calls for the number of transistors in a chip to double every other year, Gelsinger said, “Moore’s law is alive and well. Today we are predicting that we will maintain or even go faster than Moore’s law for the next decade. We as the stewards of Moore’s Law will be relentless in our path to innovate.”
By 2026, we should know if Gelsinger’s forecast came true.
