On February 10, TSMC announced that its revenue for January 2022 reached about 39.33 billion yuan, an increase of 10.8% month-on-month and a sharp increase of 35.8% year-on-year.
In TSMC's revenue, the revenue of 5nm and 7nm production lines contributed more than 50%, a large part of the production capacity of advanced production lines was packaged by Apple, the A15 chip on the iPhone 13 was produced by TSMC's 4nm process, and the A14 chip used the 5nm production line. The H1 chip used in headphones such as the AirPods Pro uses a 7nm process. AirPods has a large shipment of many headphones, and there is an H1 chip on each side, and the total order volume remains at a very high level.
According to data from a number of research institutions such as Counterpoint, Apple's mobile phone shipments returned to the first place in the world in the fourth quarter, and shipments in China also returned to the first position for a long time. Apple is likely to continue to place more orders from TSMC after seeing the iPhone 13 so popular, which may make TSMC's revenue in the first quarter of this year reach a new high.
3nm is TSMC's large-span process, and the performance of chip products has increased greatly, and the power consumption ratio will also be greatly reduced. If it is mass-produced in the second half of this year, this means that the A16 Bionic chip of the iPhone 14 will not use this process, and the iPhone 15 will most likely be used.
At the same time, the iPhone 15 is also likely to use Apple's self-developed baseband chip. Apple has accumulated a very strong technical strength in chip design, the baseband chip is mainly to solve the PROBLEM of RF modules, Apple will most likely integrate it into the A16 SoC, then the power consumption of the baseband may be greatly reduced. The iPhone 15 not only has performance to look forward to, but the battery life may also perform well.
In addition, TSMC will be more challenged by Samsung and Intel in the future. Samsung is also about to achieve mass production of the 3nm process, but the transistor density of the Samsung 3nm process is only comparable to the transistor density of the TSMC 5nm process, although the highest-end process cannot be compared with TSMC, but it may still steal some of TSMC's 5nm orders. If TSMC wants to continue to stay ahead, it must also continue to improve its technology.