TSMC To Start Preparing Their Factories For 20 Nanometer Chip Production This Month

TSMC to start preparing their factories for 20 nanometer chip production this month

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Stefan Constantinescu

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All Articles by Stefan Constantinescu

Published 3 Apr 2013

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The Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 in the HTC One, the Exynos 5 Octa in the Samsung Galaxy S4, they’re both built using 28 nanometer technology. According to DigiTimes, TSMC was supposed to start preparing their factories to pump out 20 nanometer chips in June, but progress is being made so fast that the they’ve decided to start two months earlier. As in this month.

Before you get excited, note that 20 nanometer chips are still at least three or four quarters away from actually ending up in smartphones. There’s a lot of testing that needs to be done, bugs need to be squashed, and the list just goes on and on.

What sort of new things will 20 nanometer chips bring with them? Besides better battery life, I want to say 64 bit support, but my gut tells me it’s too early for that. We “need” to move to 64 bit smartphone chips in order to get devices with more than 4 GB of RAM in them. I highly doubt Samsung wants to announce the GS5 next year and have it ship with 2 GB of RAM like the GS4, and the GS3 before it.