Anyone who cares about the semiconductor industry knows that the speed of chip performance improvement has begun to slow down. At the same time, process companies discussed some challenges they faced in reducing the size of manufacturing chips. Although it is usually related to the continuous development of Moore's law, with the decrease of the size of semiconductor process nodes, the factors affecting the performance will continue to increase.
Just a few months ago, Samsung Semiconductor's foundry business announced a major new development in transistor design, called Universal Gate (GAA), which is expected to maintain the development of transistor-level semiconductors in the next few years. Fundamentally, GAA provides a rethinking and re-architecture of the basic transistor design, in which the silicon channel inside the transistor is completely surrounded by the gate material, instead of being covered by the gate material like a triode. Just like FinFET design, this design can increase transistor density and channel scaling potential.
The whole science and technology industry is looking forward to the improvement of semiconductor technology, which will continuously reduce the size and power of semiconductors and improve their performance. GAA, together with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, is considered as the next major technological progress in the field of semiconductor manufacturing, which provides a clear path for the chip industry from 7 nm to 5 nm and then to 3 nm.
Technically speaking, because GAA FET technology reduces the voltage, it also provides a method other than FinFET design for semiconductor foundry business. With the continuous shrinking of transistors, voltage regulation has proved to be one of the most difficult challenges to overcome, but the new design method adopted by GAA has reduced this problem. A key advantage of GAA transistor is that it can reduce power consumption caused by voltage scaling and improve performance. The specific timetable of these improvements may not be as fast as before, but at least now the uncertainty about whether they will come may gradually change. For chip and equipment manufacturers, these technological advances provide a clearer perspective for the future of semiconductor manufacturing, which should give them confidence to push forward active long-term product plans.
The timing of GAA is also an accidental factor in the technology industry. Until recently, most of the progress in the semiconductor industry has focused on single-chip or single-chip SOC (System on Chip) design, which is based on silicon chips built with a single process node size. Of course, GAA will provide important benefits for these types of semiconductors. In addition, with the increasing momentum of new "small chip" SOC designs, these designs combine several smaller chip components that can be built on different process nodes, which is easily misunderstood as transistor-level enhancement will not bring much value. In fact, some people may think that as a single SOC is broken down into smaller parts, the demand for smaller manufacturing process nodes will decrease. However, the facts are more complicated and subtle. In order to make the design based on chipset really successful, the industry needs to improve the technology of some chip components and improve the packaging and interconnection to connect these components with all other chip components.
It is important to remember that the most advanced chiplet components are becoming more and more complex. These new designs require that the transistor density can be provided by 3 mm GAA fabrication. For example, specific AI accelerators, as well as increasingly complex CPU, GPU and FPGA architectures, need all the processing power they can concentrate on. Therefore, although we will continue to see some semiconductor components stop in the roadmap of process nodes and stabilize with larger process sizes, the demand for continuous process reduction of key components is still increasing.
The dependence of science and technology industry on the improvement of semiconductor performance has become so important that the potential slowdown of process technology has attracted considerable attention and even had a negative impact on the whole scientific and technological community. Although the progress brought by GAA has not even completely solved the challenges faced by the industry, they are enough to provide the development space needed for the industry to keep moving forward.
According to businesskorea, OEM consulting firm IBS announced on May 15 that Samsung Electronics is one year ahead of TSMC and two to three years ahead of Intel in GAA technology. GAA technology is the next generation of non-storage semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is regarded as a breakthrough in foundry industry.
Samsung is evaluated to be ahead of TSMC, the world's largest foundry company, in FinFET technology. FinFET process is the mainstream non-memory semiconductor manufacturing process at present.
This means that Samsung is ahead of its competitors in current and next-generation OEM technologies.
Samsung announced at the 20 19 Samsung OEM Forum held in Santa Clara, USA on May 14 local time that it will complete GAA process development next year and start mass production in 20021year.