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The most recently announced flagship has the fastest processor. Because of moving to a new process node that all flagships will soon be shipping. And...?

BTW, only 15% faster than Qualcomm 845 whereas TSMC says 7nm gives at least 20% speedup vs 10nm. So, lame.

. . . computer chips with state-of-the-art lithography soon all will be manufactured overseas. Specifically, they will be made by exactly two companies, Samsung and TSMC, with GlobalFoundries' recent announcement that it is stopping development of its 7nm process. GF operated the old IBM facility in Fishkill, NY, and AFAIK was the last company offering state-of-the-art foundry services with a fab in the US.

Intel is still in business, of course, and even has a foundry business, but it cannot seem to successfully operate it -- substantially all of its wafer starts are chips of its own design. With the capital cost of each new-generation fab reaching $20 billion, it's only a matter of time until Intel -- which has only its internal product base of chip designs to fill its fabs, while Samsung and TSMC make chips for the entire industry -- can no longer afford the move to the next generation.

If the rest of the semiconductor industry (or the US DoD) wants high-performance computer chips, there's now nowhere to go except Samsung and TSMC. It will be interesting to see what politicians do when they realize that the best digital chips can no longer be manufactured in the US. The choice seems to be either (1) have our economy -- everything from cell phones to missiles -- dependent on chips manufactured overseas, or (2) subsidize Intel's foundry business and the semiconductor equipment manufacturers to the tune of tens of $billions, just to keep a US source of high-performance semiconductors.

TSMC's SiGe process is an alternative to GaAs. They use SiGe crystals.

http://www.tsmc.com/english/de...

TSMC's Silicon Germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology delivers higher performance, faster time-to-market, lower power consumption, more competitive manufacturing costs, and superior manufacturing reliability than Gallium Arsenide technology.

Silicon Germanium BiCMOS technology includes a deep trench approach for bipolar device isolation, multiple Ft bipolar devices, deep N-well, multiple Vt devices, precision MiM capacitors, precision high poly resistors, thick-metal inductors, and high-quality varactors and diodes. CMOS devices are compatible with the TSMC's standard logic platform. Power amplifier applications have been added to the 0.18-micron SiGe technology platform to enable the integration of a power amplifier and RF transceiver front-end for WLAN applications.

Combining the integration and cost benefits of silicon with the speed of more esoteric and expensive technologies such as Gallium Arsenide, makes Silicon Germanium an ideal process for wireless/wired communication applications. Products designed for and manufactured with TSMC Silicon Germanium processes demonstrate dramatically improved functionality at a lower cost

Sounds pretty different from the proposed process where they're depositing SiGe to create defects in a Si crystal

https://news.mit.edu/2018/engi...

Instead of using amorphous materials as an artificial synapse, Kim and his colleagues looked to single-crystalline silicon, a defect-free conducting material made from atoms arranged in a continuously ordered alignment. The team sought to create a precise, one-dimensional line defect, or dislocation, through the silicon, through which ions could predictably flow.

To do so, the researchers started with a wafer of silicon, resembling, at microscopic resolution, a chicken-wire pattern. They then grew a similar pattern of silicon germanium - a material also used commonly in transistors - on top of the silicon wafer. Silicon germanium's lattice is slightly larger than that of silicon, and Kim found that together, the two perfectly mismatched materials can form a funnel-like dislocation, creating a single path through which ions can flow.

Both use SiGe, but they're using it in very different ways.

I rather strongly suspect you have no clue what you're talking about.

From the article they are using TSMC, which is one of the largest silicon foundries (ASIC manufacturing) in the world.

As for the all out open-source, they also make clear on the project page that hardware patents on the chipset instruction is supposedly strangling innovation for processors. I'm not sure I buy that, ARM, Intel and IBM have moved their architectures along pretty well. Even poor little MIPS has made strides despite losing market share.

You can now deal directly with TSMC for this, or go through third parties like MOSIS and CMP. AFAIK none of the groups that do this publish their rates, and I haven't done this myself, so my numbers come from forums like this one, rounding up the lower numbers that I have commonly seen.

What's interesting is that Intel are apparently going to make Atoms using the TSMC process. So they'll move things that don't require a really good process to the industry standard one and try to use their better proprietary process for things that do.

Apple have a huge mark-up so they could probably afford to spend a bit more than they would at TSMC to get access to Intel's process.

Incidentally 2 years ahead is only about one generation of Moore's law. So it seems like a TSMC based CPU will be two years behind. I can quite believe that this doesn't matter for netbooks but does for smartphones. I'm typing this on an 1.6Ghz N280 Atom which was built on a 45nm Intel process in 2008 and is plenty fast enough with a ten hour batter life. Right now in 2011 TSMC claim they have 28nm and 40nm in production. Smartphones always seem a bit sluggish to me - even 1Ghz ones. From what I've read TSMC have been making chipsets for Intel for some time including the 945GSE chipset used in Atom netbooks. If the future is to integrate the chipset and the CPU it makes sense to do that at TSMC because they are cheaper than Intel.

I.e. the plan was for Atom to debut on Intel's good but pricey process and then move to TSMC cheaper but one generation behind one. That lets them free up capacity at their in house fabs for customers like Apple who can pay for it.

"The TSMC 45nm process combines the most advanced 193nm immersion photolithography, performance-enhancing silicon strains, and extreme low-k (ELK) inter-metal dielectric material to bring both performance and reliability to advanced technology designs."

sauce

If you need real silicon rather than an FPGA you could talk to MOSIS (as above), or you could look at TSMC's shuttle service. (MOSIS are probably your best bet though, but it never hurts to look at a few other possibilities).

Learn it.

Go to TSMC, they will build it for you.

Happy?

300mm is the size of the silicon wafer, not the size of anything on the chip.

Current jurisprudence appears to indicate that this'll get thrown unless unless the chip company caves and settles.

I'd be surprised to see them settle, since it's TSMC, one of the biggest chip manufacturer in the world, their products are found in everything from computers to toasters...

No, really, it looks like the plaintiff is trying to pull a SCO.

You don't need to build your own fab, there are fabs out there that will gladly build your IC for you, the most popular being TSMC. Many companies use external fabs (so called "fabless" semiconductor companies), including house hold names like Nvidia or ATI.

Mind you its still expensive as hell (0.25 ~ 1million US$ for your own mask set for an advanced process) which is why many amatures use FPGAs instead.