Transistor-density metric proposed
Rick Merritt, EETimes, Mar. 28, 2017 –
SAN FRANCISCO - Intel will start making 10nm chips this year it claims will lead the industry in transistor density using a metric it challenged rivals to adopt. Separately, it announced a 22nm low-power FinFET node to compete for foundry business with fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) from rivals such as Globalfoundries.
At 10nm, Intel will pack 100.8 million transistors per square millimeter. It estimated 10nm foundry processes now in production from TSMC and Samsung have about half that density.
Intel's metric averages density of a small and a large logic cell. Specifically, it uses a two-input NAND cell with two active gates and a scan flip-flop cell with as many as 25 active gates.