Samsung Electronics has purchased a semiconductor Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool, which may help it start manufacturing 10nm chipsets before its competitors. Sources have told Business Korea that the tool was purchased from Synopsys Inc., one of the largest EDA producers. The product is called ‘IC Compiler 2’, and is optimized to improve the yield rate of the 10nm process. An EDA tool is a software tool which helps design printed circuit boards and integrated circuits. This allows chip designers to analyse the chips for errors, before putting them into production.
Samsung has already announced that it will begin mass production of chipsets using the 10mn process by the end of 2016. But, with the acquisition of the EDA tool, it is expected to catch up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) which plans on mass producing 10nm chips too, by Q3 2016. TSMC lost customers like Qualcomm to Samsung Electronics in the 14nm and 16nm FinFet processes. According to Business Korea, if the two companies start mass producing 10nm chips as planned, both with surpass Intel in fine process conversion speed, for the first time. Intel previously announced that it plans to release its 10nm Cannonlake chip in the second half of 2017.
Rumours suggest that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 830 SoC will use a 10nm production process as compared to the 14nm process currently being used in the Snapdragon 820. The new chipset is also tipped to support up to 8GB of RAM. Samsung's upcoming flagship SoC, the Exynos 8890, using a 14mn FinFet process that was also used in the Exynos 7420 SoC. The Exynos 8890 will also be the first to use Samsung’s own custom cores, called ‘M1’. The company claims that the new SoC is 30% more powerful and 10% more efficient than the Exynos 7420. The SoC also uses the Mali-T880 GPU, which is also used by Huawei’s Kirin 950 processor.