As reported by the Korean Maeil Economy earlier this week, Samsung has succeeded in making a prototype of the first 3nm process. According to the report, Samsung’s goal is to become the world’s number one semiconductor manufacturer by 2030.
Samsung has succeeded in making a prototype of the first 3nm process!
The 3 nm process is based around the Gate All Around (GAAFET) technology, which is different from the industry standard of FinFET. This change in technology reduces the total silicon size by 35% while taking less 50% less power as well. This allows for a 33% performance increase over the 5 nm FinFET process.
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The GAAFET design differs significantly from the FinFET design, and the GAAFET design is built around having four sides of the channel which makes sure that the power leakage is reduced. This improves control over the channel, which is a fundamental step when shrinking the process node. This design allows for a more efficient transistor design paired with the overall smaller node size, which enables a tremendous jump in performance per watt over a 5 nm FinFET process.
Samsung originally stated that it would use a 4 nm GAAFET process as early as 2020, while industry watchers such as Garner vice-president Samuel Wang have been skeptical that GAAFET chips would be in mass production before 2022. However, recently Wang said that it is now looking like Samsung will bring GAAFET chips to production earlier than initially expected by industry watchers. This was initially considered extremely ambitious at the time. Still, if Samsung has a working prototype of the 3 nm process, this might indicate that the vendor might be closer than initially expected.
When Samsung originally started working on the 3 nm GAAFET process a year ago, this 3 nm GAAFET process had initially been planned to begin mass production in 2021. This comes in the wake of the 7 nm commercial peak with AMD using this process in the creation of the Ryzen 3000 series.
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