Taiwanese company TSMC is the largest contract manufacturer of chips, but because of its success depends on the activity of many players in the market who are not able or do not want to diversify risks, the charging of the orders to other contractors.
TSMC today announced that the start of production of the first 16-nm processors with ARM-architecture using FinFET-structure. They were decisions HiSilicon architecture Cortex-A57 32-bit version, which will be the base for telecommunications equipment. According to TSMC representatives , the combination of 16-nm technology standards and FinFET-structures makes allow to increase the speed of transistors, reducing power consumption and currents leakage. Density transistor gates compared to 28-nm process technology HPM has doubled, and the rate increased by 40% at constant power consumption. Progress can be ordered otherwise: to reduce energy consumption by 60% at a constant speed.
TSMC led the work on the implementation of FinFET for ten years, and the combination of these structures with 16-nm process technology was approved in November 2013 following the completion of testing and experimentation. HiSilicon states that the rate of new processors for networking equipment was able to increase three-fold compared with the products of the previous generation.
Note that AMD plans to introduce FinFET-structure is also within a 16-nm technology, and it works not only with TSMC, but also with Globalfoundries.