The amount of silicon used to make those processors is enough to cover 13 Manhattan city blocks
Taiwan News
Date: 2020/08/21
By: Eric Chang, Taiwan News, Contributing Writer
TSMC Tainan office building (Reuters photo)
According to a TSMC blog post, the company has manufactured 7 nm chips for over 100 products and dozens of different customers. The amount of silicon used to make those chips is enough to cover 13 Manhattan city blocks, and with more than 1 billion transistors per chip, that is over one quintillion (a billion billion) 7nm transistors.
The company pointed out that its 7 nm process was able to achieve “high-volume production faster than any other TSMC technology before.” TSMC was also the first to use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in the commercial production of 7 nm chips, whereby the shorter wavelength of EUV light makes it easier to print nanometer-scale features on processors.
TSMC is the world’s largest semiconductor foundry and supplies some of the biggest global tech companies, like Apple and AMD. The Taiwanese companies 7 nm chips are not only in PCs, tablets, and smartphones, but in data centers, vehicles, and used to perform sophisticated training and inferencing for artificial intelligence. [FULL STORY]
