TSMC 1.6nm technology A16 for the first time! Mass production will begin in 2026

TSMC said on Wednesday (April 24) that a new chip manufacturing technology it is developing called "A16" will go into production in the second half of 2026, when it will compete with long-time rival Intel in a "big showdown" of the most cutting-edge chips.

TSMC is the world's largest contract manufacturer of advanced chips and a major partner of Nvidia and Apple. The company announced the "A16" at a conference in Santa Clara, California. TSMC executives said at the conference that AI chip companies are likely to be the first adopters of the technology, rather than smartphone makers. But AI chip companies need to optimize their designs to get the full performance of TSMC's processes.

According to reports, the A16 will combine TSMC's super rail architecture with nanosheet transistors. Superrail technology can move the power supply network to the back of the wafer, freeing up more space on the front of the wafer, thereby increasing logical density and performance, making the A16 suitable for high efficiency computing (HPC) products with complex signal wiring and dense power networks.

According to media reports, compared with the N2P process, the A16 chip density is increased by up to 1.10 times, and the speed is 8-10% faster under the same operating voltage; At the same speed, power consumption is reduced by 15-20%. In addition to A16, TSMC also announced that it will launch N4C technology, N4C continues N4P technology, grain cost reduction of up to 8.5% and low adoption threshold, is expected to be mass production in 2025. In response to the latest announcement, analysts pointed out that TSMC's new technology may put a lot of pressure on Intel, which announced in February that it would use a new technology called "14A" to replace TSMC and make the world's fastest computing chips.

Big showdown with Intel

Kevin Zhang, senior vice president of business development at TSMC, said the company's newly developed A16 chip manufacturing process is moving faster than expected due to demand from artificial intelligence chip companies. "Ai chip companies are eager to optimize their designs to bring out the full performance of our processes," Zhang noted.

For the A16, TSMC has enough confidence. Zhang believes that it is not necessary to use the Dutch chip equipment manufacturer ASML's new "high numerical aperture EUV" lithography machine to produce the A16 chip. In contrast, Intel revealed last week that it plans to be the first company to use ASML's machine in order to develop its 14A chip.

Asml's high numerical aperture EUV cost $373 million per unit. "By some metrics, I don't think they're ahead," Dan Hutcheson, vice chairman of analytics firm TechInsights, said of Intel. Kevin Krewell, head of TIRIAS Research, argues that the technology Intel and TSMC are developing is still years away from mass production, and they need to prove that the final chips match their advertised capabilities.

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