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There has been a lot of discussion on SemiWiki lately around 14nm FinFET technology and who really leads and by how much. I thought it would be interesting to review some process metrics for previous technology generation and then make some forecasts around 10nm.

The focus of this article will be Intel, TSMC and Global Foundries/Samsung as the logic volume leaders:

• Intel is the world’s largest semiconductor and far and away the largest IDM logic producer today.
• TSMC is the world’s largest foundry
• Global Foundries is the world’s second largest foundry. We have combined them with Samsung because they are both members of the common platform alliance and closely aligned in process technology. In fact Global Foundries has licensed Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process technology.

The characterization of process density has shifted over the years and nodes have become less reflective of actual feature sizes and density. A more recent metric that Intel has been using is Gate Pitch (GP) multiplied by Metal 1 Pitch (M1P). This same metric has also shown up in a recent paper by the common platform partners disclosing their 10nm process work. GP x M1P will be the metric used for comparison in this paper.

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