ARM's Artemis 10nm FinFET Test Chip
ARM has been working closely with TSMC for a number of years now. Over the last six years especially, ARM and TSMC have collaborated to ensure that the latter’s cutting-edge process technologies work well with the former’s processor IP. With every generation since 2010, the companies have built ARM’s most advanced processor cores on TSMC’s most advanced emerging process nodes.
The collaboration successfully began with a test chip produced at 28nm, but today ARM is announcing the successful tape-out of a test chip featuring next-generation, premium 64-Bit ARM v8-A mobile processor cores, codenamed Artemis, and manufactured using TSMC’s upcoming 10nm FinFET process technology.
The device produced through the collaboration is a relatively simple silicon qualification test chip structure in comparison to an actual commercial product.This gives ARM the ability to assess what the process can do with an advanced core and also provide feedback to the foundry on the device performance, metal stacks, and design rules.
Doing this allows the company to do performance and power analysis benchmark testing and validation on 10nm FinFET silicon, before finalized designs are put into production.
ARM Artemis Test Chip Block Diagram
The test chip features an Artemis cluster, which is essentially a quad-core processor with power management IP, a single-shader Mali graphics core, AMBA AXI interconnect and test ROMs connected to a second cluster by an asynchronous bridge that features the memory subsystem, which is stacked with a Cortex M core that handles control logic, some timers, SRAM, and external IO.
Above is a comparison of a fully optimized A72-based SoC produced at 16nm to an early test sample of the Artemis test chip produced with the 10nm FinFET process. The frequencies were close with a delta of only around 10 - 12%.
Power characteristics, however, show much improvement. Leakage is down around 10%, but dynamic power dropped by approximately 50%. ARM and TSMC expect to optimise the process to further improve frequency scaling and performance. This should ultimately settle in at about a 30% power improvement, but with increased overall performance.
Compared to 16nm FinFET+, at nominal voltage, the 10nm test chip offered a 12% performance improvement in a similar power envelope. In overdrive mode (Vod, the second annotated bullet) the test chip offered an approximate 11% performance improvement with similar power. In super-overdrive mode (Vsod), the Artemis test chip offered similar performance, but at 30% lower power.
The 10nm FinFET Artemis test chip was actually taped out in late December 2015 with ARM getting working silicon back for testing and qualification a few weeks back.
SoCs for premium mobile devices with next-generation cores produced on the 10nm process node are expected to arrive later in the second half of this year.