Apple, over the last few years, has leveraged its growing chip design knowledge to gain an added edge in performance and battery life. For example, in the iPhone 6S, Apple optimized the flash memory controller, which improves the speed of accessing flash data ( see iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Results and June 2012 blog Flash Memory Controller is the Secret Sauce )

Apple’s A9 process is fabricated using TSMC’s 16 nm finFET process. The A9 is fabricated using an 12 metal (11-Cu, 1-Al), 16 nm finFET CMOS process. The device features approximately 33 nm long metal gate finFET transistors having a 90 nm minimum contacted gate pitch; the same as used by their 20 nm HKMG process released in the summer of 2015.  Read article…