Samsung announces 10nm FinFET based SoC in Mass Production

Samsung has announced mass production of a System-on-Chip (SoC) products built on its third-generation 10nm FinFET manufacturing process.

Company’s previous 14nm process based chips were the Exynos 8890 and the Snapdragon 820 which have powered up a variety of high-end smartphones last this year.

Any specification about what kind of SoC the mass production is undergoing, but you can expect next generation Exynos chips from Samsung or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820/821 successor to be built on the Samsung’s 10nm process.

Samsung’s new 10nm FinFET process (10LPE) adopts an advanced 3D transistor structure with additional enhancements in both process technology and design enablement compared to its 14nm predecessor, allowing up to 30-percent increase in area efficiency with 27-percent higher performance or 40-percent lower power consumption. In order to overcome scaling limitations, cutting edge techniques such as triple-patterning to allow bi-directional routing are also used to retain design and routing flexibility from prior nodes.

The technology promises some advantages with respect to significant speed and power efficiency compared to the current generation so you can expect the devices powered with this 10nm process to have a boost in performance and speed.

One thing to be considered is that that the new chips may have advantage over many recent and upcoming products which are still using 16nm manufacturing processes including examples of Apple’s A10 or other TSMC customers who have to wait till next year for 10nm FinFET. Samsung or other vendors such as Qualcomm might be in a good position staying ahead of the competition. However MediaTek has also been in work with Helio X30 which is built on 10nm manufacturing process.