News: TSMC is 65nm ready

[Cooper]

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company today told a packed audience at its 2006 Technology Symposium that the company has fully qualified its 65-nanometer (nm) low power process technology. The announcement officially opens the doors for TSMC to deliver the production-ready 65nm process.

Both NVidia and ATI are using TSMC fabrics

Source (http://www.tsmc.com/english/default.htm#)

[hicookie]

will G80 be 65nm?

[ahmad]

http://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&&newsid=1806&&newsdate=2006/05/17&&language=E#top

Thats the link to the article. Sweet stuff.

TSMC’s 65nm NexsysSM technology is the company’s third-generation semiconductor process employing both copper interconnects and low-k dielectrics. It is a 9-layer metal process with core voltages of 1.0 or 1.2 volts, and I/O voltages of 1.8, 2.5 or 3.3 volts. The new technology offering supports a standard cell gate density twice that of TSMC’s 90nm NexsysSM process. It also features very competitive 6T SRAM and 1T embedded DRAM memory cell sizes. In addition, this technology offering includes mixed signal and radio frequency functionality to support analog and wireless design, embedded high density memory to support integration of logic and memory, and electrical fuse to support customer encryption needs.


Nice. ATi and Nvidia need to get cracking on those die shrinks.

[nn_step]

Sweet how much longer till the 65 nm R600?

[onewingedangel]

the 90nm shift was only 6 months ago for ati, and 2 for nvidia, so i doubt we'll be seeing 65nm products shipping this year

[cky2k6]

why wouldnt they use 65nm this year? its ready, cheaper, and requires nothing more than asking for a 65nm sample and seeing how it behaves... im pretty sure r600 at least will already be 65nm, g80 might still be 90nm.

[OmegaMerc]

I'll go ahead and say we will see 65nm by the end of the year. What better way to save money and increase performance then by lowering wafer size?

[MaxxxRacer]

why wouldnt they use 65nm this year? its ready, cheaper, and requires nothing more than asking for a 65nm sample and seeing how it behaves... im pretty sure r600 at least will already be 65nm, g80 might still be 90nm.

IIRC its not that simple. the simplicity is lost because of the improvments that they make in the 65nm process. with different gate sizes and speeds, the layout of the core needs to be changed to support/take advantage of the 65nm process. if TSMC didnt do anything but a die shrink it would be alot easier i think. BUT that would be kind of silly when, the improvements they made should help make the die even smaller and give better performance..

[ahmad]

IIRC its not that simple. the simplicity is lost because of the improvments that they make in the 65nm process. with different gate sizes and speeds, the layout of the core needs to be changed to support/take advantage of the 65nm process. if TSMC didnt do anything but a die shrink it would be alot easier i think. BUT that would be kind of silly when, the improvements they made should help make the die even smaller and give better performance..

In addition, because this is a different manufacturing process, it will be more than likely that certain gate layouts/formations would not work as expected with a bigger process.

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a couple of cards using 65nm fab by the end of 2006. In fact, I would expect some sooner than that.

[cky2k6]

well, for all we know, ati could have had samples of tsmc's 65nm process way before it was ready for official release. im positive that ati designed r600 for 65nm production, why would they pass up an opportunity for cheaper silicon.

[Ubermann]

I guess there will be a with R600 at 90 or 80nm first then a new modell with higher clocks at 65nm later when its fully tested.

Dont think they want another r520 fiasco =)

[[XC] leviathan18]

video cards manufactures learned.... you can see it on nvidia mid range always get the smaller process available just to test it in a simple gpu after that the next major release the high gets that process 130nm 6800gt 110nm 6600gt then 7800gt 110nm 7200 90nm then 7900gt 90nm

[eddieate]

yeah but remember how bad ATI's 110nm process was? lets hope they get the 'in-between' 80nm right.
Ed.

[onewingedangel]

Ati didn't go for the high speed 110nm process though, rather a cheaper bulk 110nm process, with the expectation that their high end parts would be migrating to a high speed 90nm process shortly, of course those plans got delayed...

[coldpower27]

Considering we haven't seen 80nm prodctus from both ATI or Nvidia I think talking about 65nm products is a bit premature for this year.

Typically Nvidia and ATI are about 12 to 18 month behind Intel on processes if history is an indication.

So expect 65nm sometime in 2007.

[Starscream]

why wouldnt we see 65nm this year?

If the yields are good there is a good chance wel will se a budget or midrange 65nm card this year.
why not?

maybe r600 and g80 will stil be 90nm and later on 65nm.
As said by others Nvidia and ATI usualy tend to experiement with a high-end gpu when moving to a new procede.

but if 65nm is doable im shure ATi and Nvidia will try to shrink their midrange/budget cards to 65nm.

Cause vista is comin and they both will wanna spam the market with cheap grafix cards that can support every feature of Vista for 100 euro (ofc at the same time making the consumer think that its an uber card).
it wont be uber high end cards but something cheap for OEM PCs.

and if 65nm is doable we could well see a crappy 65nm vista ready card for christmas.
That is ofc if vista doesnt apear to far after the start of 2007.
I forgot when Vista was planned ot come exactly i thought start 2007 but i dont bother to keep up with MS laucnh dates as they tend to be to much bull.

[JuanFlaiter]

Let´s hope they can manage to lower their TDPs and energy consumption in 65nm.