Apple A-series chip supplier Samsung this week announced plans to put a next-generation 10-nanometer chip fabrication process into production later in 2016, with the new technology supposedly affording a 10% increase in efficiency over existing iterations.

"We believe Samsung, despite some recent delays, will still be the first mover to 10-nanometer technology," Mark. C. Newman, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research, wrote in a note to clients Thursday. "TSMC and Intel will soon follow, whereas Globalfoundries can hardly keep up. Samsung can still edge ahead of TSMC."

"Samsung is the sole supplier for all Qualcomm future 14nm chipsets and modems," Warren Lau, an analyst with Maybank Kim Eng in Hong Kong, said in emailed comments to EE Times. "This is also the case at 10nm."

In a bid to catch up and potentially gain new customers, Globalfoundries licensed 14nm LPE and 14nm LPP technologies from Samsung Electronics. However, going forward Globalfoundries hopes to develop its own manufacturing processes.

Intel plans to produce its first "10-nanometer" processors in the second half of 2017, CEO Brian Krzanich said Wednesday. Intel hadn't given a start date for the process before, but many observers had expected it to arrive some time next year.

Intel's Cannonlake, originally slated for 2016 and later 2017, is now on hold indefinitely. Instead, Intel's current processors - of the Skylake platform - will be succeeded by the less drastic Kaby Lake platform.

NVIDIA reiterates for the second time in three months that TSMC is their primary manufacturing partner as they head towards 16nm, and even 10nm production.

Samsung was shy on specs, but said the process node will be in full production by the end of 2016, about the same time as its rival TSMC.

A new leaked roadmap slide purportedly showing Intel's plans through to the end of 2016 has been published by a Finnish computer technology website. If the slide is genuine we will likely see Intel release its first 10nm Cannonlake CPUs sometime around the second and third quarters of next year.

The world's most expensive semiconductor fabrication plant - at over US$14 billion - was announced at the ground breaking ceremony Thursday (May 7) by Samsung. Located in the Godeok Industrial Complex at Pyeongtaek City Gyeonggi-do Province - called "Samsung Semiconductor Valley" - in South Korea, Samsung will be building 10-nanometer FinFET semiconductors there.

Intel will adopt quantum well FETs (QWFETs) at the 10nm node (most likely), which will probably go into production in late 2015 or early 2016 (alternatively at 7nm in 2017 or 2018).

TSMC has been working hard on the next step, the 10nm node. Its management has said that 10nm would begin to make money late 2016.

Fifty years after Gordon Moore first described the trend that has driven technology, Intel says scaling is same as it ever was. But other chipmakers, who are struggling to realize the same benefits from good old-fashioned scaling, are increasingly looking for less-expensive alternatives.

Intel will describe what it claims are some of the world's smallest DRAM and I/O circuits here this week, a testament to its 14nm process technology. In a preview of at least five papers at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, one Intel executive also continued to express optimism about the company's work on 10nm and 7nm nodes.

The Advanced Patterning Center will offer the global semiconductor ecosystem crucial patterning knowledge for sub-10nm technologies.

The firm unveiled the chip at a recent exhibition hosted by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.

Intel, Toshiba and Samsung Electronics will join hands to develop technologies that could more than halve semiconductor line widths to nearly 10 nanometers by 2016, the Nikkei daily reported.