Recently, TSMC President Wei Zhejia revealed at the French conference a month ago that the progress of 3NM support is in line with expectations and will be mass-produced in the second half of this year. However, according to the latest news from DigiTimes, semiconductor equipment manufacturers said that TSMC's 3NM yield climbing encountered greater resistance, and it has also revised the 3NM blueprint many times.
The semiconductor equipment manufacturer also added that TSMC has divided the 3NM process into N3, N3E and N3B versions to meet the needs of different customers. At present, Apple, Intel and other large manufacturers have booked most of the 3NM production capacity, and now TSMC's yield has been hindered, I don't know if we have the opportunity to see the latest products of each big factory as scheduled.
Compared with 5NM, the transistor density of the 3NM process is increased by 70%, the performance is increased by 15%, and the power consumption is reduced by 30%, and the chip using the process will have a big improvement over the 5NM chip, especially the smart phone, the internal space is limited, and the heat dissipation effect cannot be compared with tablets, PCs and other products, so the requirements for the chip process are higher.
In the past two years, TSMC's process technology will always be better than Samsung, especially the fiercely competitive 7NM, 5NM nodes, the chips produced by the former have basically not shown signs of overturning, and the Snapdragon and Orion chips built based on Samsung's 5NM process seem to be less than ideal.
At the 3NM node, Samsung uses GAAFET surround gate field effect transistor technology, theoretically, the transistor density is higher, the power consumption is lower, and TSMC's 3NM is likely to be a FinFET stereo transistor technology, that is, the latter 3NM yield climb is blocked, Samsung is expected to get more opportunities to overtake.
TSMC has repeatedly modified the blueprint, indicating that the process difficulty of 3NM is indeed much higher than that of 5NM, if large-scale mass production is delayed, Apple, Intel and other manufacturers may become the biggest losers, after all, TSMC is almost their only foundry, and the delay in the new process means that many products are slower than the opponent. In addition, the final effect of the 3NM process has also become one of the aspects that Xiaolei is most concerned about.
Of course, the president of TSMC is full of confidence that the 3NM progress is in line with expectations, which may indicate that the yield climb is only a "small episode", and the new products created by the process can still arrive as scheduled, and I believe that next year we can still see the new chip released on time.