Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Intel stated:
“We have a market lead in transitioning to the next-generation process technology and bringing products to market using such technology in Q4 2017.”
However 10nm products have not yet been announced by Intel.
For many decades, the state of a company’s process technology was measured by size of the drawn gate length when a chip was in volume production which was defined by the ITRS as 10k wafers per year.
TI started the rot by describing a process as a 65nm process when it had a drawn gate length of 130nm
Intel’s 22nm process had a drawn gate length of 27nm.
TSMC’s 16nm process had a drawn gate length of 20nm.
Globalfoundries’ 14nm process also had a drawn gate length of 20nm.
It became normal for chips to contain no feature which was the size of the number used to describe the process which made them.
However it was still assumed that a chip had to be in volume production before a process could be considered established.
Now, Intel appears to be dispensing with that convention as well.
TSMC and Samsung say they’ll be producing on 7nm processes this year while Intel’s 10nm process, thought to be equivalent to the TSMC/Samsung 7nm process, may not start production till 2019.
