Or a 2015 thing.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is making steady progress on its next two nodes, bringing advances in performance and low power. The bad news is it's widely expected the latest nodes add less transistor density and more cost than in the past.
TSMC has taped out several 20nm chips and expects to let customers start designing 16nm FinFET chips before the end of the year. By the end of 2014 it expects it will have taped out 25 20nm designs and be far along in work on 30 16nm chips.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319679Let that sink in. TSMC expect by the end of next year to only have taped out two dozen designs. Now think about all the billion dollar semiconductor companies in the world, AMD, NVidia, NXP, Infineon, Texas Instruments, etc. TSMC isn't talking about thousands of 20nm chip tapeouts or even hundreds but a staggering two dozen to be taped out by the end of the year.
16/14nm isn't even a possibility for 2014. The only one who will have it is Intel who spends $10B a year on R&D and builds their own fabs. Even Intel is pushing back 16nm chips to the later half of 2014 due to yield issues. So saying 16nm and 2014 in the same sentence even with "maybe" is just wrong.
TSMC is just starting production 20nm in Q3-2014. It has never been done before, costs will be extremely high, tons of risk, yields are unknown, double patterning will be required for the first time which present a whole host of design and production challenges, and we are talking about two dozen designs for the entire planet. Still think KNC said they will have a 20/16nm chip in 2014? (Hint: they didn't.)
