Posted on Thursday, May 02 2019 @ 12:16 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
During TSMC's quarterly earnings call, CEO and vice chairman CC Wei explained that most customers of the foundry's N7 process will move to N6. The 6nm process is an improvement of the 7nm node, it has the same design results but offers 18 percent higher logic density. It will be easy for customers to transition, with low development costs, so N6 is likely to become another high-volume process.
As previously reported, TSMC’s N6 process technologies adopts extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) to lower manufacturing complexity by reducing the number of exposures required for multi-patterning (which is needed today as TSMC’s N7 uses solely DUV lithography). TSMC does not explicitly say how many layers use EUVL on N7+ or N6, but the company does confirm that the latter adds one additional EUVL layer when compared to the former.
Via: AnandTech
