Intel develops their own 7nm process, but have even worse results than 10nm

Intel spent 29 billions in 2018 on 10nm and related things, this is up from around 12 billions that was enough during days of first 14nm chips.

And results are really disappointing, number of defective chips is still at 90-99%.

For five decades, there have been amazing improvements in the productivity and performance of integrated circuit technology. While the industry has surmounted many obstacles put in front of it, it seems the barriers keep getting bigger, IC Insights noted. Despite this, IC designers and manufacturers are developing solutions that seem more revolutionary than evolutionary to increase chip functionality.

TSMC's 5nm process is under development and scheduled to enter risk production in the first half of 2019, with volume production coming in 2020. The process will use EUV.

It'll be big wall, not barriers. Because as soon as real improvement will stop they won't be able to use usual practice or ramping up volume and/or price.

Already buyers of premium smartphones are mostly paying for slow progress we can observe. Intel also specially made price hike to try to inject more money (as it is only thing that current management understand).

Industry new rumors

Despite the optimism about its 7nm chip sales, TSMC expressed caution about the foundry's overall operations citing factors on a macro level. The foundry expects 2019 to be "a slow year" for its business and also the global chip sector. It forecasts that the foundry segment will register only flat growth.

Small industry rumors leaks suggest that actual price for 7nm product is very high due to very low yields still. Issues with 7nm process can be real reason behind too big prices for iPhone and Samsung smartphones, as well as Radeon VII. In case of really lower prices they had no chances to supply the product.

Rumors are that we can hear some bad news during 2019 concerning 5nm process and such

Top investors are pulling out of industry. Mubadala Investment sold all AMD stock.
Now it become known that Vision Fund that belong to Softbank fully sold their $4 billion stocks package, even bearing some losses due to NVidea stock price drop.
2019 can be first year where all industry will hit the wall and will be faced with rising costs and fewer sales.

Intel still not fully sure if it can make 10nm in 2019

More on marketing

TSMC’s 7nm is not denser than Intel’s pending 10nm node. Intel’s 10nm process is actually denser than TSMC’s 7nm process – Intel's 10nm (6T) process is 100 mega-transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm2), while TSMC's 7nm (7.5T) weighs in at 66 MTr/mm2.

Intel 3D stacking tech, nothing new

Note that it is badly suited for high performance chips due to cooling problems.

More optimism before collapse into the wall

3nm aka the wall aka final stop

Dr. Jung also introduced some of recent research and development in future silicon technology, including MRAM, a non-volatile memory solution embedded in conventional logic process, and 3nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology.

MRAM is one of the examples of new semiconductor devices that consume much less power. As memory density becomes higher, MRAM’s power efficiency becomes more prominent, consuming only 0.5% of power compared to SRAM at 1,024Mb. MRAM also has smaller cell area, which allows design flexibility.

Samsung’s unique GAA technology called Multi-Bridge-Channel FET(MBCFET) uses vertically stacked multiple nanosheet channels. With variable width of nanosheet, this technology provides not only optimal performance and power characteristics, but also high design flexibility. Furthermore, MBCFET is fabricated using 90% or more of FinFET process with only a few revised masks, allowing easy migration.

With one of its newly published papers at 2018 IEDM, Samsung Electronics shared the development progress of 3nm, a successful demonstration of fully functioning high-density SRAM circuit. The development of Samsung’s first process node applying MBCFET technology is on schedule.

Just wow!

SemiAccurate has learned that Intel just pulled the plug on their struggling 10nm process. Before you jump to conclusions, we think this is both the right thing to do and a good thing for the company.

For several years now SemiAccurate has been saying the the 10nm process as proposed by Intel would never be financially viable. Now we are hearing from trusted moles that the process is indeed dead and that is a good thing for Intel, if they had continued along their current path the disaster would have been untenable. Our moles are saying the deed has finally been done.

Intel managers decline this

Media reports published today that Intel is ending work on the 10nm process are untrue. We are making good progress on 10nm. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared during our last earnings report.

Industry rumors are that Intel 10nm won't be usable for any 4 core or better CPUs for at least 2020.

Company has extreme problems with 10nm that they can't solve for many years.

According to our sources, ATIC (Which owns about nine-tens of Globalfoundries) is in the process of looking for potential buyers for GlobalFoundries.

Nice.

So from 4 remaining competitors:

• GlobalFoundries cancelled new technology, out of competition and will do 14nm and less only
• Intel has huge issues with 10nm (it is actually same or even better than others 7nm)
• TSMC use huge Apple money and seems to be on track for 7nm (yet not fully true 7nm)
• Samsung is similar to TSMC, but can also use their own big smartphones profits