Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Improvements in 5nm Chips

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is pressing ahead with more improvements to its 5-nanometer process technology. It includes the introduction of its N5A enhancement for automotive application processors designed for AI-enabled driver assistance and N6RF for 5G smartphone chips.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is billing N5A as a way to bring technology used in supercomputers to vehicles and smartphones. Available in the third quarter of 2022, the new design packs the performance, power efficiency, and logic density of the foundry’s industry-first 5nm N5 process.

The new method went into volume creation last year. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company said that it has seen defect density improvements with its 5nm process than it had with the preceding 7nm generation. The company said that the N5A enhancement meets automotive safety and quality standards for packaged integrated circuits such as the AEC-Q100 Grade 2 stress test. N5A-based ICs are expected to appear in driver assistance applications, digitized cockpit systems, and other applications.

The company announced its roadmap for enhanced and specialized 5nm process technologies at its 2021 Technology Symposium, held virtually for the second year in a row. The Hsinchu, Taiwan-based semiconductor giant said N4, the next enhancement to its first-generation N5 5nm process, is set for risk production in the third quarter of this year. The next stage after N4 is N3, which is testing and is projected for volume production in the second half of 2022. The N3 process is anticipated to deliver either a 15% speed gain or a 30% reduction in power consumption compared with N5 and will also provide up to a 70% logic density gain.