Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 was released with performance benchmarking for the Android camp, and Huawei's next-generation Kirin flagship also began to frequently leak news. It is no surprise that it will be launched on the Mate 40 series in the second half of next year.
The Kirin 990 5G processor uses TSMC's 7nm EUV process and integrates 10.3 billion transistors. For the first time in mobile SoCs, it has exceeded 10 billion. The chip area is 113.31 square millimeters, which is about 90.9 million transistors per square millimeter.
Huawei's next-generation flagship SoC is said to be called Kirin 1020, code-named Baltimore. According to reports, the performance can be improved by up to 50% compared to Kirin 990. The main reason is that the CPU architecture is upgraded from A76 to A78, which leads Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, A77 used in MediaTek Teana 1000, and integrated 5G baseband as standard.
Kirin 1020 is set to use TSMC's 5nm process, and the transistor density will naturally increase. The latest news says that it is expected to reach about 171.3 million per square millimeter.
5nm will be another important process node of TSMC, using the fifth generation FinFET transistor technology, EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography technology has also been extended to more than 10 lithography layers, and is divided into two versions N5, N5P.
The performance N5 version is improved by 15% and the power consumption is reduced by 30%.
TSMC is currently trial production of 5nm, the average yield of test chips is as high as 80%, the highest can exceed 90%, it is expected to be put into mass production in the first half of next year.