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GlobalFoundries to Spend $10-12 Billion on a 7nm Fab, Possibly $14-18 Billion for 5nm

Accepted submission by takyon at 2017-10-01 23:29:52
Techonomics

GlobalFoundries: Next-generation chip factories will cost at least $10 billion [venturebeat.com]

The economics of the chip industry are pretty staggering. Sanjay Jha, CEO of contract chip manufacturer Globalfoundries [globalfoundries.com], recently told me that it could cost between $10 billion and $12 billion to build a next-generation chip factory based on the latest technology, dubbed 7-nanometer production. And one for the generation after that, dubbed 5-nanometer production, could cost $14 billion to $18 billion.

There are only a few companies in the world that can afford to spend that much money on a chip factory. And they can do it because those chips are expected to generate billions of dollars in revenue over the life of the factory.

Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat interviewed Sanjay Jha, CEO of GlobalFoundries:

Basically, the numbers don't mean much these days. I think Samsung has talked about 10nm, 11nm, 14nm, 8nm, 7nm, 6nm. I don't know what they mean. The way to think about 12nm is it has higher performance and more scale than 14nm. It's not quite the scaling or performance of 10nm. Performance may be very close to 10nm, though.

What has happened, as the line widths get closer, it's getting harder and harder to get incremental performance. You can get scale that you want, but getting performance is harder. You can get some power consumption reduction, as well. With 14nm, most people use .8. At 10nm, most people are using .7. As you go, there's a clear scaling with the ratio of the squares of those two numbers. That gives you about 20-25 percent reduction in power consumption. So we deliver performance, some power consumption reduction, and scaling.

[...] VB: Going back to where the specs are on nanometers, how do customers view the problem of figuring out who's really ahead of the game as far as manufacturing?

Jha: They look at four things. They look at density, performance, power consumption, and cost. We call it PPAC. That's what most customers care about. They don't care about 12nm or 10nm. Even if the density of 12nm is a little lower than 10nm, if the complexity of the process is lower and the cost is lower and the power consumption may be lower, that may allow them to go after the mobile space a little better than 10nm. They look at the PPAC and target it to particular models.

Rock's law [wikipedia.org].

Related: AMD, GlobalFoundries Renew Vows, Focus on Path to 7nm [soylentnews.org]
IBM Demonstrates 5nm Chip With Horizontal Gate-All-Around Transistors [soylentnews.org]
AMD Expected to Release Ryzen CPUs on a 12nm Process in Q1 2018 [soylentnews.org]


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