Intel could jump right into its 7nm litho with just barely going through 10nm.

New information suggests that Intel's 10nm lithography delay would have its days numbered before it was released since the 7nm lithography is very mature.

Intel initially had the 10nm lithography planned for 2016, but the company has encountered more problems than expected and are working against the clock to get it to market as soon as possible to market in the form of processors. The process currently only allows the creation of just over 50% of viable processors and this prevents them from being marketed, since they would arrive at an absurdly high price, with mass production expected by the end of 2019. This has been a problem for the company, both in product line as well as business.

Intel's 10nm lithography is being a major headache for the company.

According to information from Anandtech the 10nm lithography could have a fairly short life, since the company has continued to develop the 7nm which would be evolving as expected and would be included in the company's original Roadmap.

On several occasions the company has said that the scale density of the transistors is too aggressive for the 10nm manufacturing process, being the main problem that the company has had with this lithograph.

Intel's new 10nm lithography is based entirely on deep ultraviolet lithography (DUVL) with lasers fusing at a 193mm wavelength. To enable these fine feature sizes Intel set out to achieve 10nm, through a process of intensive use of multiple patterns. The problem with this process according to the company is that it is the intensive use of multiple patterns specifically.

Producing based on Intel's 7nm is to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) with a laser wavelength of 13.5nm for selected layers, reducing the use of multiple patterns for certain metallic layers and therefore simplifying the time of production and cycles are shortened.

Apparently 7nm has been developed in parallel to 10nm and by a completely different development team. The result of this development is on-brand and is projected on the HVM according to the company's Roadmap. Murthy Renduchintala, the company's Director of Engineering and President of Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Groups, is reported to have said the following during the 39th Nasdaq Investor Conference:

"7nm for us is a separate team and largely a separate effort"

“We are very satisfied with our 7nm progress. In fact, very happy with our progress in 7nm. I think we've taken a lot of lessons from the 10nm experience as we define that and define a different optimization point between density, power, and transistor performance and schedule predictability […] So we're very, very focused on obtaining 7nm according to our original internal plans "

“One thing I'm going to say is that if you look at 7nm, for us this is really a point in time where we will have the EUV back in the fabrication matrix and therefore I think that will give us a certain degree of return to the traditional cadence of Moore's Law "

"[With 7nm] We are going back to more of a 2X scaling factor […] and then we continue to move towards that goal."