A direct attack on Intel, in form, timing and manner. On the day in which the Santa Clara giant presented its quarterly report, and at the moment the stock market is not rewarding the result, TSMC presented itself at the Technology Symposium in Santa Clara and announced that its 1.6 nm processor will be ready in 2026what is called 16A in jargon, where the A stands for Ångström, a unit of measurement smaller than the nanometer (10A is equivalent to 1nm).
Intel was the first to announce the arrival on the market of processors with node density below 2 nanometers: the first 20A (2 nm) products should arrive by the end of the year and the delivery of the first 18A processor, however TSMC showed up in Santa Clara announcing that it is already ready to go down even further in size.
Not only that: it is also ready to implement a power technology similar to the one that Intel announced in recent years and which was supposed to represent the real advantage over its competitors, namely PowerVia. PowerVia is the Intel solution that involves decoupling signal power in the chips by making the power travel in the lower, or rear, part: this allows designers to reduce the size of the transistors, reducing crowding which leads to lengthening the signal trace. TSMC has confirmed that its Super Power Rail solution allows power to be provided from the bottom leaving only signal and clock on the frontend.
Not too many details are given, we only know that the 16A processors will offer around 10% more performance than the TSMC N2P node and that with the same performance they will be 15/20% more efficient in terms of consumption. Moving the power supply to the lower side will also allow for a 10% increase in transistor density.
Today TSMC is producing 3nm processors especially for Apple, but it is a sort of soft transition: the size of the node has decreased, but the transistors used are still the FinFets that were used for the 5nm and 7nm chips.
The real leap will take place at the beginning of next year when the 2nm node with GAA transistors, Gate All Around, arrives, and precisely in relation to this node and the announcement of the 16A chips we can understand how much now also in the world of semiconductors there is a good dose of marketing and communication.
When TSMC revealed its roadmap, it explained that it would start with 2nm GAA but then, in a later iteration, bring the rear power to 2nm with the N2E node following N2P and N2X. Just do 1+1 to understand that what was once called “N2E” it is the one that has now been renamed 16A, a name that coincidentally clashes with the nomenclature chosen by Intel.
In short, what TSMC announced does not seem to be a new node but something that was already on the roadmap, renamed to stiffen the competition with the company that seems to be able to become its biggest rival in the future.
Intel has invested heavily in the production of processors, and in certain aspects it is actually ahead of TSMC: for PowerVia, in fact, we won’t have to wait too long, it will already be present on the processors produced at the end of this year, but above all Intel is the only one to have purchased a high-NA lithography apparatus from AMSL, and has recently finished assembling it in the Hillsboro foundrywhich will allow the first 14A chips to be produced at the end of 2026.
TSMC will currently remain with EUV technology: AMSL’s most advanced equipment is too expensive to implement and can satisfy customers with the machines it already has.
