Race to the FinFETS

The demand for smartphones and tablets with better performance and longer battery life has been driving the industry to come up with chips that are faster, smaller and use less power. To remain on this treadmill known as Moore’s Law, chipmakers have in recent years relied on a series of technological breakthroughs, most recently 3-D transistors known as FinFETs.

Intel started production with FinFETs in late 2011 with its 22nm Ivy Bridge processors and since then it has shipped more than 500 million chips. These are mostly for PCs and servers, though it is on target to ship 40 million tablet processors this year, and it is offering the technology to other customers as a foundry. Now the other foundries, which manufacture chips for customers such as Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek, are scrambling to catch up.

In the past week TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has made two announcements meant to signal its progress on FinFETs. First, TSMC said it had produced a working network processor, with 32 ARM Cortex-A57 CPU cores, for HiSilicon, the chip division of Huawei. Then, earlier this week, the foundry announced that a 64-bit ARM big.LITTLE test chip manufactured on its 16nm FinFET process delivers sustained speeds of 2.3GHz with its big Cortex-A57 cores and uses only 75 milliwatts of power with its little A53 cores on typical applications.