Samsung will use gate-all-around transistors for 3nm chips from 2021
Samsung has ready the 0.1 version of a 3nm process that uses gate-all-around transistors. These enable smaller and more economical chips. Mass production will begin at the end of 2021.
Current chip designs use finfets. To enable the move to smaller chip structures such as 3nm, a new transistor design is needed. Samsung is now showing its own developed variant of a gaa transistor: the Multi-Bridge Channel Field Effect Transistor, or mbcfet.
Chip manufacturers have been researching coolets for years, usually based on a design with nanowires. That allows very small designs, but is difficult to produce. Samsung’s mbcfet variant uses nanosheets instead of nanowires, increasing the surface area.
Samsung is now announcing that it released the first version of the 3GAE Process Design Kit to customers in April. 3GAE is the name that Samsung gives to its 3nm process with gate-all-around transistors. According to AnandTech, the chip manufacturer expects to be able to make the first tape-outs in 2020 and the first 3nm chips will be made at the end of that year. Mass production is expected to start at the end of 2021.
Compared to Samsung’s current 7nm process, the new 3nm process provides a space saving of 45 percent and consumption is 50 percent lower, or performance is 35 percent higher. Samsung expects that the 3nm chips will be widely used for, for example, smartphones and applications for artificial intelligence.
According to Samsung, it is easy for chip designers to switch to the 3nm process with the new transistor design. Designs made for Samsung’s upcoming 4nm process with finfets are compatible with the new process.
Samsung has also further explained its current roadmap. The mass production of 6nm chips will start in the second half of this year, according to the electronics giant, and the development of the 4nm process should be completed during the same period. That is the last process in which Samsung uses finfets. Furthermore, Samsung expects its 5nm process to be ready in the second half of this year and that mass production can start in the first half of 2020.