Taiwanese chip maker TSMC has
announced that it will moving to mass production of mobile chips using a 7nm manufacturing process in the first half of 2018, beating Intel to the node. As a current supplier of Apple's A9 and A9X chips the news could provide an insight into the type of technology that may appear in a future iPhone. If Apple maintains TSMC as a chip fabricator for its A-series chips, it could point to a potential Apple A12 chip powering a late 2018 iPhone using 7nm lithography.
Apple's current A9 chip production is currently shared between TSMC and Samsung, somewhat controversially, using two different manufacturing processes. A9 chips produced by TSMC's foundry are made on its 16nm process, while A9 chips coming from Samsung are being produced on its 14nm process. This has led to relatively minor performance and battery life differences between iPhones equipped with one or the other versions of the A9, despite the underlying Apple chip architecture remaining fundamentally identical.
According to IBM, chips built on a 10nm process will be the last to use pure silicon. The Apple A10 chip, expected to power the next iPhone, could be fabricated on a 10nm process, although TSMC's late 2016 time frame for mass production means that an A10 chip could remain on the current 14nm/16nm node. Any gains in performance under those circumstances would come from architecture enhancements alone. Intel's latest 14nm 'Skylake' processors have a new, more efficient architecture, but have been built using the same 14nm process first introduced with the preceding "Broadwell" design.
In recently creating the world's first chip built on a 7nm process, it worked with Global Foundries, Samsung, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute using a silicon-germanium alloy to ensure that electrons behaved properly at that level. The advantage of moving to smaller nodes means that more transistors can be packed on to the die. Also, electrons also more densely packed, bringing inherent speed and efficiency gains.
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