New engineering challenges are making it difficult for chipmakers to keep up with Moore's Law, the prediction that the density of transistors in processors will double every two years. But Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. continues to advance in this direction, and announces the creation of the 5 nanometer cell phone chip, which should revolutionize the mobile world (once again).
Samsung is not content with just being a maker of consumer electronics such as smartphones, televisions, home appliances and computers, but it is also among the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world. According to the announcement on the company's official website, which took place last Monday night, the company managed to reduce the size of its transistors to five nanometers. That's smaller than the seven nanometers of the processor that powers the Galaxy S10.
What can Samsung's 5nm chip do?
Reducing the size of transistors means that more of them are put on a chip, which increases performance. And smaller transistors also require less power to run, which saves your smartphone battery. In the case of Samsung's five-nanometer chips, performance increases by 10% when compared to current processing speed, and 20% less power consumption than their seven-nanometer predecessors, depending on the configuration.
Samsung is producing both generations of chips using an emerging manufacturing method called extreme ultraviolet lithography. As the name suggests, the technique involves using rays of extreme ultraviolet light to etch circuit patterns onto the silicon sheets, which processors are made of. These beams have a considerably shorter wavelength than the light typically used in chip production, which allows manufacturing machines to create smaller transistors.
Samsung expects to start mass production of five-nanometer chips in the second half of 2020. Development comes less than two weeks after TSMC Co. Ltd., another major semiconductor maker, announced that it has also started making five-nanometer processors. Intel Corp., meanwhile, is not expected to use extreme ultraviolet lithography until 2021.
