TSMC is ready to move to volume production of their 16nm FinFET process, Nvidia is joining them based on a recent report. This is interesting news for several reasons, included the one that is called 20nm. Is this fab process now skipped ?

TSMC confirmed NVIDIA will be using this process. TSMC's 16nm FinFET process has passed full reliability qualification, and nearly 60 customer designs are currently scheduled to tape out by the end of 2015, the company announced previously.

TSMC expects to move the node to volume production around July 2015. As Digitimes reports, the list of clients that will use 16nm are Avago Technologies, Freescale, LG Electronics, MediaTek, Nvidia, Renesas Electronics and Xilin, these are the early adopters of TSMC's 16nm FinFET process, the foundry disclosed.

Others have noticed this, but it is interesting to see that AMD was not (yet) included in that list, but since there are supposed to be 60 customers we think that'll not be an issue. Anyway, after 16nm there will be 10 nm. Due to size and complexity with Biilions of transistors these days we expect 16nm FinFET GPUs to arrive by Q3 2015. Keep in mind that current high-end GPUs are still based 28nm, so the step forward will be tremendous.





