The rocky road to 20nm

As the industry adopts 32/28nm technology, the Common Platform development teams aren’t letting grass grow under their feet. The next generation of mobile computing will utilize 20nm. However, climbing Mt Everest might present less challenges than scaling down one more step from today’s norm.

Extreme Ultra-Violet Lithography features are going in opposite directions - performance up, power down. Consumers want their devices to do more, go faster, but without increasing power consumption. The criteria requires novel transistor scaling techniques and highly integrated lithography/design collaboration. Advances in transistor device engineering, extended immersion lithography in the 20nm node, and further development of EUV Lithography [Extreme UltraViolet] are on the table.