Samsung has announced that it will be starting the mass production of its third generation manufacturing process with FinFET transistors in late 2016. Now this means that we will be looking at the first 16nm commercial chips from Samsung in 2017.
Currently the company has a full PDK and a silicon verified IP available with early design activities already taking place at Samsung.
Apart from this the South Korean company isn’t bringing any 10nm chips yet the 16nm based on the 10nm FinFET process will substantially improve on its existing 14nm ones.
Now the new 10nm process manufacturing will basically shrink the size of the transistor fins, transistor gate and interconnect pitches compared to the company’s 14nm process technologies.
It shrinks the pitch geometry much more which then leads to higher performance, lower per-transistor costs and increased transistor density.
This will be a great benefit for all those companies that use Samsung Foundry’s services. The first trial production of its 10nm FinFET manufacturing technology will come out in late 2015.
The upcoming Exynos processor was though to benefit from this new 10nm process technology but it quite difficult for Samsung to get enough 16nm FinFET chips in time for the Samsung Galaxy S7.
It seems that the whole industry wants to get the 10nm as quickly as possible. However Intel has abandoned this race till 2017, Samsung and TSMC are moving really fast towards this goal.
