FinFETs Race Toward Silicon

100+ tapeouts so far include 16nm TSMC chips

Rick Merritt, EETimes
3/10/2015 01:30 PM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. — More than 100 chips in or headed for production have taped out using FinFET-based process technologies, according to EDA tool vendor Synopsys Inc. The chips include a quad ARM Cortex-A72 device made in TSMC’s 16nm process, it said.

Synopsys claims its Galaxy Design Platform has been used by 90 percent of the production-bound FinFET chips that have taped out to date. The news was released the same day archrival Cadence Design Systems announced Innovus, its next-generation physical design tool which claims significant speed ups in FinFET and planar processes.

The news suggests TSMC and Samsung are running neck-and-neck to close the gap with Intel which has been in production with 14nm processors for several months.

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