At the SAFE Forum (Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem), Samsung revealed its plans for aboriginal semiconductor nodes. Last year, the institution unveiled the Exynos 2600, the archetypal 2nm smartphone spot – this 1 was made connected the SF2 node arsenic Samsung calls it.
Next up is SF2P, which volition trim powerfulness depletion by 26% and rise timepiece speeds by 15%. The caller node is lone partially liable for these improvements. Shin Jong-shin, VP of the Design Platform Development Team astatine Samsung Foundry, attributes much than fractional of the gains to DTCO.
DTCO, oregon Design-Technology Co-Optimization, is simply a chip-making attack that combines semiconductor manufacturing methodology and spot plan – traditionally, these are 2 abstracted steps successful gathering a caller chip, but moving connected them simultaneously enables amended optimized designs. This leads to higher speeds, little powerfulness and adjacent outgo savings.
SF2P+ volition travel adjacent – wide accumulation is expected to commencement betwixt 2027 and 2028. There is different node successful the works too, SF2X, but that 1 volition beryllium optimized for AI hardware.
Samsung is besides moving connected ways to battalion much SRAM onto chips. SRAM is utilized to physique the registers and the cache of a CPU oregon GPU. It’s ace fast, but takes up much country than DRAM – to enactment things into perspective, a emblematic SRAM compartment (which stores a azygous bit, i.e. a 0 oregon a 1) needs 6 transistors, portion a DRAM compartment needs lone 1 transistor.
The Nvidia Rubin GPU (fabbed connected TSMC’s N3 node) has 128MB of on-die SRAM. Samsung and Groq are moving connected an LLM accelerator that volition person much than 500MB of SRAM and this is connected the older 4nm node. Samsung-backed Rebellions showed disconnected the REBEL-100 AI accelerator, which is presently being produced connected Samsung’s 4nm node.
After the 2nm era, Samsung volition modulation to 1.4nm nodes starting with SF1.4, which is scheduled for 2029 wide production. This volition beryllium followed by SF1.4+ successful 2030. SF1.4 was primitively scheduled for 2027, but the timeline was pushed backmost a mates of years ago.
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