Industry Expert Blogs

Recently TechInsights analyzed a Bitcoin Miner chip fabbed at SMIC and declared SMIC has a 7nm process. There has been some debate as to whether the SMIC process is really 7nm and what it means if it is 7nm. I wanted to discuss the case for and against the process being 7nm, and what I think it means.

First off, I want to say I am not going to reveal all the specific pitches, if you want that data you need to purchase a report from TechInsights.

Is it 7nm?

The key pitches for a process technology are Fin Pitch (FP), Contacted Poly Pitch (CPP) and Metal 2 Pitch (M2P). The SMIC pitches for FP are larger than TSMC 10nm FP, and the CPP and M2P are the same as TSMC 10nm. So is this really a relaxed 10nm process, it is not that simple.

The SMIC process also has some Design Technology Co-Optimization (DTCO) features not seen at 10nm. Specifically, TSMC and Samsung 10nm have 8.25 and 8.75 track height respectively at 10nm, SMIC is 6 tracks something that Samsung didn’t do until 5nm and TSMC at 7nm. SMIC also has a Single Diffusion Break (SDB) something Samsung had at 10nm but went away from at 7nm and didn’t get back to until 5nm, and TSMC didn’t implement until their second generation 7nm process (7+).

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