Samsung has beaten arch-rival TSMC to the 3nm chip and is starting limited production for a Chinese crypto mining accelerator. The headline isn’t the 3nm metric, but rather that Samsung has shifted from FinFET to GAA transistors, the first to do so. GAA stands for Gate-All-Around, which employs nanosheets, and these are a way to construct the transistor gates. Samsung claims a 45 percent reduction in power consumption, and up to a 23 percent speed hike over 5nm chips. Making a new process node is about transistor density, rather than some nominal measurement that you would be hard pressed to identify on the silicon. This would make a more informative and descriptive metric, so can we please start using this instead?
CL