Posted on Monday, February 27 2017 @ 13:43 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Taiwanese foundry UMC announced it's now offering volume production on its 14nm FinFET process node. This is earlier than expected, just a couple of months ago the company said it wouldn't offer 14nm until Q2 2017. UMC says its 14nm node offers industry-competitive yields and reveals its 14nm FinFET node features 55 percent higher speed, 50 percent lower power consumption and twice the gate density over its 28nm node.
United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE:UMC;TWSE: 2303) ("UMC"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced that it has entered mass production for customer ICs based on the company’s self-developed 14nm FinFET technology. The foundry is shipping 14nm wafers to its lead customers and has achieved industry-competitive yields for the highly advanced process, which is being utilized for pioneering new consumer electronic applications.
Po-Wen Yen, CEO of UMC said, “This 14nm volume production milestone is the culmination of UMC’s close collaboration with its customers, demonstrating the success of our collaborative approach to bringing leading-edge technologies to market. We will continue to refine this process and are working with other customers to bring the full performance, power and gate density benefits of 14nm FinFET to enable next generation silicon in areas such as networking, AI and various consumer products."
UMC’s 14nm FinFET technology performance is competitive with the semiconductor industry’s leading standards, featuring 55% higher speed and twice the gate density over 28nm process technology. The leading-edge 14nm process also consumes approximately 50% less power than 28nm. UMC is producing the 14nm customer ICs at the company’s Fab 12A in Tainan, Taiwan and expects to steadily ramp its 14nm manufacturing capacity according to customer demand.
