TSMC Enters Volume Production at 7 nm

TSMC's 7 nm process (N7) is the semiconductor manufacturing node that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company began producing in volume in 2018. TSMC says on its own site that in 2018 it became the first foundry — a company that manufactures chips for others — to start 7 nm FinFET volume production. Its 20-F annual report for 2018 says 7 nm reached 9% of total wafer revenue that year. Among the earliest parts made on it in volume was Apple's A12 Bionic, in the iPhone XS released on 21 September 2018 in a first wave of countries that included Japan.

One thing to settle first: "7 nm" is the name of a node, not a length you can measure somewhere on the chip. A 2020 IEEE Spectrum article put it plainly: "Most of the critical features of a 7-nm transistor are actually considerably larger than 7 nm, and that disconnect between nomenclature and physical reality has been the case for about two decades."

What happened in 2018

TSMC's 2018 20-F sums up the year in three steps: volume production of 7 nm began; 7-nanometer Plus (N7+), an enhanced version, moved from R&D to manufacturing; and 5 nm development continued toward risk production in 2019.

According to TSMC's announcement of October 2019, N7+ was the industry's first commercially available extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology to deliver customer products to market in high volume. It entered volume production in the second quarter of 2019 and offered 15 to 20% more density than N7, with improved power consumption. In other words, the N7 of 2018 did not use EUV; EUV reached volume production a year later, with N7+.

TSMC's customers in 2018: revenue by headquarters

The 20-F also breaks down net revenue by the country where each customer is headquartered. These are company-wide figures, not 7 nm alone: in 2018 North America accounted for 61.8%, China 17.0% and Japan 5.6%.

According to the same report, 2018 capital spending went mainly into installing and expanding capacity for the 7 nm and 5 nm nodes, alongside expanding buildings for Fab 15 in the Central Taiwan Science Park and establishing Fab 18 in the Southern Taiwan Science Park. Seven nanometres was a new node at 9% of revenue, but the centre of investment had already moved there.

Apple A12 Bionic: 7 nm in a phone

On 12 September 2018 Apple announced the iPhone XS and XS Max and introduced the A12 Bionic as "the first 7-nanometer chip ever in a smartphone". Pre-orders opened on 14 September, the phones went on sale on 21 September, and Japan was among the first-day countries.

Apple does not name its foundry. The evidence that TSMC made the A12 comes from the teardown firm TechInsights, which described it as a TSMC 7 nm FinFET chip and later reported a die area of 83.27 mm². As a Motley Fool article noted, that made the 6.9-billion-transistor A12 smaller than the previous year's 4.3-billion-transistor A11 at 87.66 mm².

Apple also said the A12's performance cores were up to 15% faster, its efficiency cores up to 50% more efficient and its GPU up to 50% faster — Apple's own comparisons.

Rivals falling away and falling behind

2018 was also a year in which the field at the leading edge thinned.

GlobalFoundries stepped back. In August 2018 GlobalFoundries put its 7 nm FinFET programme on hold indefinitely. As bit-tech reported, AMD, its main customer, said it would focus the breadth of its 7 nm portfolio on TSMC's 7 nm process.

Intel's 10 nm slipped. On the July 2018 earnings call, interim CEO Bob Swan said Intel expected 10 nm "systems on shelves for the 2019 holiday season". bit-tech noted that the process had originally been scheduled for 2015. Intel's 10 nm and TSMC's 7 nm carry different numbers, but as above, comparing node names by their digits says little.

TSMC's customer list in the 20-F already included AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and MediaTek — and Intel.

The nodes after

After 7 nm TSMC moved on to N7+, N6 and N5. The October 2019 announcement said N6 would enter risk production in the first quarter of 2020 and volume production by the end of that year. NVIDIA's H100 data-centre GPU of 2022 is built on TSMC 4N. See also the M1 of 2020, with which Apple moved the Mac to its own chips.

The iPhone side of the story is on iPhone XS / XR; the rule of thumb behind node shrinks is Moore's law; the parts of the period are on the hardware timeline.