After the chip foundry industry entered the process within 10nm, the cost pressures faced by it are also getting higher and higher.
According to the report of SemiEngineering, IBS estimates show that the development cost of the 10nm chip has exceeded 170 million U.S. dollars, 7nm is close to 300 million U.S. dollars, and 5nm is more than 500 million U.S. dollars. If you want to develop a complex chip such as NVIDIA GPU based on 3nm, Design costs will be as high as $1.5 billion.
For this reason, the foundry has to produce 40,000 wafers per month, costing between 15 billion and 20 billion U.S. dollars.
Before 14nm, every 18 months to advance a generation of process, the price is a 30% increase, but after entering 14nm, this trend will soon not be seen.
Therefore, Gary Patton, chief technology officer of GF, said that looking into the future, 7nm will be a long-standing node, because 5nm/3nm may be difficult to achieve a balance between power consumption, performance, area, and cost.
Currently, Samsung is the only company to announce the progress of 3nm. They plan to deliver the v0.01 version of PDK in 2019 and conduct trial production in 2021.
