Seven nanometres enters volume production
In April 2018 TSMC took its N7 process into volume production. By July 2020 the node had made one billion good dies for well over a hundred products from dozens of customers, and TSMC was the first foundry to bring 7nm to high-volume manufacturing.
Why it matters
The atlas knows the accelerators - GeForce 256, CUDA, tensor cores, A100, H100 - and does not know who prints them. This is the first record about the manufacturer: from this node on, a leading-edge accelerator is a thing ordered from one company's fab, and its availability starts to depend on whose turn it is there.
"A technology that entered volume production in April 2018" is TSMC's own wording in its note on the billionth die, and that is where the date comes from. The billionth good N7 die was made in July 2020; by then the node carried "well over 100 products from dozens of customers". The April node is not yet extreme ultraviolet. EUV reached seven nanometres later, with N7+, which began volume production in the second quarter of 2019 and was, in TSMC's wording, the industry's first commercially available EUV lithography technology. N7+ gives 15 to 20 per cent more density than N7. The research report this record was made from labelled April 2018 "DUV / EUV"; those are two nodes a year apart. What this record does not claim. TSMC's 2018 annual report could not be read: investor.tsmc.com answers 403 and the Wayback copy of that PDF is truncated at one mebibyte. So the figures the report attributed to it - 10.8 million 12-inch equivalent wafers, 63 per cent of revenue from 28nm and below, 56 per cent of the world foundry market - are not here. The one volume figure that could be read belongs to a different year: "more than 12 million 12-inch equivalent wafers per year in 2019", from the N7+ press release.