Boarding TSMC’s 45nm shuttle

At least 10 companies have already signed up for TSMC’s 45nm CyberShuttle and, based on that success, TSMC’s board approved another fifth of a billion dollars (US) to expand the company’s 45nm line in its Fab 12 facility. What does 45nm buy you? Well, for starters, you’ll get close to a billion transistors to work with. TSMC claims it can pattern more than 500 million transistors in a 70mm² chip. You also get reduced-power operation from TSMC’s ELK (extremely low K) dielectric.

The march towards the billion-transistor logic chip continues to call into question the industry’s ability to design large systems that can use all of these mega-millions of transistors. Although companies like TSMC continue to offer development kits and cell libraries, surfing Moore’s Law on 45nm waves is going to require much more rigor at the systems-design level.

Burning the midnight oil at TSMC’s Fab 12