Samsung launches its manufacturing process at 7 nm with euv

Samsung has begun the process of making 7nm chips using EUV technology, a story that follows a similar announcement earlier this month by its largest foundry rival, TSMC.

Samsung is already capable of manufacturing 7nm chips using EUV technology

The South Korean giant also announced that it is sampling 256GB RDIMMs based on its 16Gbit DRAM chips, and plans for solid-state drives with embedded Xilinx FPGAs. But the 7nm news was the highlight of the event, a milestone driven in part by its in-house development of an EUV mask inspection system.

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The 7LPP process will offer up to a 40% reduction in size and up to 20% more speed or 50% less power consumption compared to its current 10nm node. The process is said to have attracted clients including web giants, network companies and mobile providers like Qualcomm. However, Samsung doesn't expect customer announcements until early next year.

The EUV systems supported 250W light sources, on a sustained basis from earlier this year at Samsung's S3 factory in Hwaseong, South Korea, said Bob Stear, director of foundry marketing for Samsung. The power level brought the performance up to 1, 500 wafers per day. Since then, EUV systems have reached a peak of 280 W, and Samsung is aiming for 300 W.

EUV removes a fifth of the masks required with traditional argon fluoride systems, increasing yields. However, the node still requires some multiple patterns in the base layers at the front end of the line. Samsung will undoubtedly make things very difficult for TSMC.

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