The 28nm Cost
We've created 28nm chips, but the cost may outweigh the benefits.
The race to produce 28nm chips is on--and for good reason. It features twice the gate density of the previous 40nm process and one-third less power while having up to three times the speed. Companies like UMC, TSMC, and Samsung have all announced 28nm process technology that meets the need of applications that still require high performance, like the chip embedded in the Apple Watch.
Qualcomm's 28nm Snapdragon chip.
However, the cost to produce 28nm may outweigh its advantages, as the equipment to produce the 28nm requires higher sensitivity and there is greater leakage than producing 40nm tech (increasing performance causes more leakage power dissipation). The challenge to ramp up 20nm into high-volume production would be to lower the cost of production to equal or less than 40nm, and that may simply be an impossibility.
In fact, according to many, 28nm is the last node of Moore's law because, while smaller transistors may be created, the cost won't be less than previous nodes. The announcement that SMIC's collaboration with Qualcomm to produce 28nm chips was successful comes, then, with some trepidation-- the chip may enable integrated LTE, great graphics, and 64-bit capable processing, but at what price?
Last month, TSMC announced they had found a way to cut production costs by 10% on 28nm chips. It's a step in the right direction, but costs must be lowered even further if the end result isn't pushing the price onto the easiest target: the customer.
