TSMC now hopes to scare competition with 2nm plans

One of their top managers told that they plan to make new factory tailored for 2nm processes soon, near their upcoming 5nm plant.

Unofficially they plan to have first commercial 2nm chips ready in 2024.

I highly doubt it, as one of them main reasons of TSMC winning this round had been misleading marketing calling real 10-11nm process as 7nm.

So, most probably nice graphics on top will be in reality significantly different and we can see some new marketing stunts.

Global foundries, of course, also never had 12nm process that AMD used for previous Ryzen chips, it had been just renamed and improved 14nm, ala Intel 14nm+++.

Sales of smartphones in the China market tumbled by 31.3% on quarter and 16.7% on year to 71.7 million units in the first quarter of 2019.

Big dangers for semiconductors progress ahead, as with development costs rising exponentially drop on smartphone market can lead to disaster.

TSMC plans considering 5nm (marketing ones)

TSMC has already kicked off risk production of 5nm chips, said the report, adding that the process is expected to be ready for commercial production in the second quarter of 2020 when the phase-one facility of the foundry's new Fab 18 comes online.

Dubbed N5+, namely 5nm Plus, the process node will feature both performance and power consumption advances, according to a recent Chinese-language Commercial Times report. The foundry is expected to move N5+ to risk production in the first quarter of 2020, the report said.

New Intel PR

10nm Process Technology: Intel’s first volume 10nm processor, a mobile PC platform code-named “Ice Lake,” will begin shipping in June. The Ice Lake platform will take full advantage of 10nm along with architecture innovations. It is expected to deliver approximately 3 times faster wireless speeds, 2 times faster video transcode speeds, 2 times faster graphics performance, and 2.5 to 3 times faster artificial intelligence (AI) performance over previous generation products1. As announced, Ice Lake-based devices from Intel OEM partners will be on shelves for the 2019 holiday season. Intel also plans to launch multiple 10nm products across the portfolio through 2019 and 2020, including additional CPUs for client and server, the Intel® Agilex™ family of FPGAs, the Intel® Nervana™ NNP-I (AI inference processor), a general-purpose GPU and the “Snow Ridge” 5G-ready network system-on-chip (SOC).

The company plans to effectively deliver performance and scaling at the beginning of a node, plus another performance improvement within the node through multiple intra-node optimizations within the technology generation.

7nm Status: Renduchintala provided first updates on Intel’s 7nm process technology that will deliver 2 times scaling and is expected to provide approximately 20 percent increase in performance per watt with a 4 times reduction in design rule complexity. It will mark the company’s first commercial use of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a technology that will help drive scaling for multiple node generations.

The lead 7nm product is expected to be an Intel Xe architecture-based, general-purpose GPU for data center AI and high-performance computing. It will embody a heterogeneous approach to product construction using advanced packaging technology. On the heels of Intel’s first discrete GPU coming in 2020, the 7nm general purpose GPU is expected to launch in 2021.

AMD goals

• AMD publically assured that they believe that TSMC could keep up with demand, this means that issue is present and actual
• AMD plans to increase CPU prices
• AMD hence plans to increase gross margin to 41% this year and up to 44% next year as they try to move as much money into investors pockets as possible
• We will see repeat of smartphones and cameras market issues in next 2 years in CPU market.

Not only 10nm is not ready, it will be slower even in Intel dreams

AMD approach with chiplets is much smarter, but be ready to expect lot of bad surprises in Zen 2.

GlobalFoundries is being sold part by part now.

ON Semiconductor Corporation (Nasdaq: ON) (“ON Semiconductor”) and GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement for ON Semiconductor to acquire a 300mm fab located in East Fishkill, New York. The total consideration for the acquisition is $430 million, of which $100 million has been paid at signing of the definitive agreement, and $330 million will be paid at the end of 2022, after which ON Semiconductor will gain full operational control of the fab, and the site’s employees will transition to ON Semiconductor. Completion of the transaction is subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.

The agreement allows ON Semiconductor to increase its 300mm production at the East Fishkill fab over several years, and allows for GLOBALFOUNDRIES to transition its numerous technologies to the company’s three other at-scale 300mm sites. Under the terms of the agreement, GLOBALFOUNDRIES will manufacture 300mm wafers for ON Semiconductor until the end of 2022. First production of 300mm wafers for ON Semiconductor is expected to start in 2020.

https://www.globalfoundries.com/news-events/press-releases/semiconductor-and-globalfoundries-partner-transfer-ownership-east

AMD's 7nm CPU and GPU are expected to be adopted by Sony in its next-generation PlayStation and the processors are estimated to be ready in the third quarter of 2020 for the games console's expected release in the second half of 2020, according to industry sources.

The sources from the IC back-end services sector noted that the processors' packaging and testing will be handled by Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL).

We have some issue with 7nm TSMC process companies try to cover up. And note - this process is very close to modern 14nm by Intel and much less advanced compared to 10nm that Intel fails to make working for last years.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) has disclosed semiconductor sales for February 2019 fell 7.3% on month and 10.6% from a year earlier to US$32.9 billion. Sales declined on both sequential and bases across all regional markets. February semiconductor sales in the Americas registered decreases of 12.9% sequentially and 22.9% on year, while those in China were down 7.8% on month and 8.5% from the same period in 2018

NAND and DRAM price drops play important role here, but any sales drop are very dangerous for industry where costs are exponentially rising. And it is no place for mergers already.

New Xbox and Playstation are delayed till 2020 at least

TSMC is having issues with ramping up 7nm production and still don't have good costs for now. it is enough for premium products but not for profit limited ones.

We can see also very strange scenery with Ryzen 2 release. Some models can be available only months after announcement or even early 2020.

3D stacking of RAM and NAND is nothing new, for example it had been used in lot of Panasonic cameras.
But almost all new cameras not using it.

Issue is heat dissipation, you can't stack RAM on top of desktop processor, as this is thing that managers keep telling to investors to calm them. Not only your processor frequency will need to drop a lot, but you will also get lot of issues with memory as need to move back to much larger elements to keep it stable.

Intel will certainly try something like this in the low end, Atom power level chips, and may be Y chips. But even in U chips it will be issues.

Although Intel has announced its 10nm Ice Lake will begin mass production in the second half of 2019, Digitimes Research's sources from the upstream supply chain has revealed that there are still many issues with the CPU giant's mass production schedule for 10nm process.

Intel previously said that its new 14nm Comet Lake would have a performance not worse than Ice Lake. Digitimes Research believes Intel could shift its investments directly to 7nm process development, skipping 10nm.

Things are bad, really bad.

The semiconductor roadmap could extend a decade to a 1-nm node or it could falter before the 3-nm node for lack of new resist chemistries.

People now talk about disturbing uncertainties that are natural outgrowths of the many challenges perpetually appearing on the path to next-generation chip.

One of the next big challenges is brewing more sensitive resist materials for the 3-nm node. Today’s chemically amplified resists (CARs) “are OK for the current and maybe next generation, but we’d like new platforms,” said Tony Yen, a vice president at ASML.

The resists are one way to reduce random errors known as stochastics, an old problem but one raising its head aggressively as engineers push toward the 5-nm node. Yen was bullish that ASML will deal with the defects that threaten yields.

Phillipe Leray, a metrology specialist at imec, was less optimistic. “We have to tackle the defect challenge in the near future,” he said. “Time is running out, and I don’t see any solution around the corner.”

The challenges are so steep that engineers are widening the scope of solutions they are considering in every area of chip technology. “We are looking at just about everything in advanced patterning,” said consultant Erik Hosler, noting that EUV emerged from the advanced patterning section of the conference that he now helps oversee.

Moving to 450-mm wafers and 9-inch reticles is one of the few areas not worth pursuing given the cost and limited payback. “We had an extensive 450-mm effort years ago, but you need a whole ecosystem, and without it, we won’t drive that change,” said Rich Wise, a technology manager at Lam Research.

“We are making progress, but we can extrapolate to where features are less than the diameter of a silicon atom, so lithography-driven scaling will come to an end,” said Harry Levinson, a lithographer with AMD and GlobalFoundries for more than 30 years.

“Limits do exist, but the best way around them is to change the paradigm,” said Chris Mack, a veteran consultant and author on lithography. “The brick wall is often in our own minds — innovations can move it and then we repeat the process of pushing.”

Almost all will be talking about brick wall one year from now and in two years all main industries will hit it.