Samsung is the first chipmaker to launch a brand new technology that will eventually be used by all major chipmakers and will find its way into all types of computer chips, including those from Intel, Nvidia and AMD. It’s called gate-all-around (GAA) and it’s changing the way transistors, the building blocks of all our technology products, are made.
GAA (sometimes referred to as GAAFET) replaces the FinFET technology that is widely used today. It’s a new technology that uses a gate wrapped around multiple transistor channels. This is a bit different than FinFET, which uses a single fin as a channel with a gate connected on three sides.
Why is this significant? GAA essentially allows multiple channels to be stacked on top of each other; more channels, larger scaling capacity. This is why GAA is so important for extremely compact process nodes like 3nm and 2nm. The other thing is that GAAFet channels can be adjusted in width, from wires to leaves, which in turn can help in shrinking with each node and increasing performance.
Samsung calls its GAA technology Multi-Bridge-Channel FET, or MBCFET for short, and its new 3nm process node using this new MBCFET technology is now in the first phase of production. This new MBCFET technology “defies FinFET performance limitations, improves power efficiency by reducing supply voltage levels while improving performance by increasing drive current capability,” says Samsung.
Samsung’s first-generation 3nm process node aims to reduce power consumption by 45%, increase performance by 23% and take up 16% less space than its current 5nm process. From there, Samsung hopes to build chips using its second-generation 3nm process that are 50% more efficient, 30% faster, and 35% smaller.
That’s serious progress that could result in some tasty processors from Samsung’s partners at the time. At the moment, Samsung has a major gaming client that we all know very well, and that’s Nvidia. Today, Samsung is responsible for manufacturing the RTX 30 series on its 8nm process node.
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However, it remains to be seen whether Nvidia will stick with Samsung for future cards. It is rumored that the green team could switch back to TSMC for its 4nm process node, but it has not yet been confirmed by the company itself. However, this would not be entirely unexpected. Nvidia used to use TSMC for all of its graphics card needs, but only recently switched to Samsung, which it had only worked with on some low-end cards in the past.
TSMC is the primary chipmaker for pretty much AMD’s entire lineup, including CPUs and GPUs. So, this single chipmaker could become very important for PC gaming in the near future.
Samsung may be ahead for now, but TSMC won’t be far behind. In fact, all major players have a version of GAA in the works, including Intel with its RibbonFET equivalent (opens in new tab)“, which will be an integral part of the 20A process node to come in 2024; and TSMC, which plans to introduce something similar with its N2 process node (opens in new tab) in 2025. TSMC and Intel may announce early production of these chips ahead of these given dates, now that Samsung has given the go-ahead.
For today, however, it’s Samsung, the company trying to take over part of TSMC’s booming business, that can claim the first win.