IT home February 22 news, according to Digitimes reported that there are semiconductor equipment suppliers sources said that TSMC has obtained a large number of orders for processes below 7nm from the five major manufacturers in the United States, and it can even be expected that 2nm orders in 2025 have been scheduled, and TSMC's future financial report is expected to be more eye-catching.
According to reports, almost all suppliers that can develop 3nm chip designs and can afford the increasing foundry costs have placed orders from TSMC. The source also said the foundry has seen scenarios of customers waiting in line with prepayments for their available 3nm FinFET process capabilities.
Intel is a big customer of TSMC's 7nm and 5nm process technologies and is believed to be one of the first customers besides Apple to receive the first capacity of TSMC's 3nm process, the sources said.
Sources also said that Apple has signed a contract with TSMC to manufacture its in-house developed processors to support the upcoming iPhone, iPad, Mac and MacBook series, and TSMC is expected to complete more than 10 million Mac chip orders by the end of 2022 and will become a foundry partner for Apple's AR headsets and other new products.
The GPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPU that Intel plans to launch in 2023 will be manufactured using TSMC's 3nm FinFET process. Intel's Arrow Lake will succeed Meteor Lake in 2024, and its GPU blocks are also manufactured using TSMC's 3nm process technology.
It is worth mentioning that Intel is also expected to become one of the initial customers of TSMC's 2nm process, for example, Intel's Lunar Lake CPU planned to launch in 2025 will use GPU blocks manufactured by TSMC's 2nm process.
At the same time, TSMC remains the primary foundry partner for AMD's advanced processors and is reaping the most benefits from the growing market share of CPUs.
In addition, The Lec also reported that Qualcomm has decided to entrust all of its 3nm process next-generation application processor (AP) foundries to TSMC, rather than Samsung Electronics, which will be released (commercially) next year. In addition, Qualcomm also handed over some of the APs in the 4nm order, which is currently completely oem by Samsung Electronics, to TSMC for dualization.
Qualcomm made this decision because the yield of Samsung's process was too low to lead to unsatisfactory supply. Previously, Nvidia also handed over the graphics card business originally entrusted to Samsung's 7nm process to TSMC last year. With the loss of large companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia becoming a reality, Samsung's foundry business may face a major crisis.
According to the news of the smartphone industry on the 22nd, Qualcomm's latest AP Snapdragon 8 Gen1 has been transformed from a complete Samsung Electronics 4nm foundry to some TSMC foundries, and it is expected to be supplied to smart phone manufacturers from the second quarter of this year.
In addition, Qualcomm decided to continue to use Samsung foundry chips and increase the use of 7nm Qualcomm decided to continue to use Samsung's foundry to produce 7nm radio frequency (RF) chips and increase the number.
According to industry insiders, the Qualcomm 4nm AP yield of Samsung OEM is only about 35%. In other words, if 100 Snapdragon 8 Gen1 are manufactured, there are 65 defective products. Bizarrely, Samsung's own Exynos 2200 yield on the same production line is even lower than that.
A person familiar with the matter said, "The reason why Qualcomm's chip yield is higher than Exynos is because Qualcomm's executives and technicians are stationed in Samsung's foundry business to solve the yield problem." This is also the reason why it was finally decided to pursue TSMC's two-pronged approach. Subsequent 4nm foundries, as well as the entire 3nm foundry, will be entrusted to TSMC. "As far as possible, in the case of global semiconductor shortages, it can no longer be pulled by Samsung's yield."
Qualcomm conveyed this policy to Samsung Electronics MX Business (Wireless Business) President Lu Taiwen. It is reported that Qualcomm said when Lu Taiwen visited its headquarters last year: "Even if you want to give more orders to Samsung, you can't implement them because of yield problems."
The industry believes that Samsung Electronics Headquarters recently began to audit the foundry department, and the decisive factor was the failure to meet the AP shipments of the wireless division due to the decline in 4nm yield.
An industry insider said: "Like the Snapdragon 8, some of Qualcomm's 3nm foundries next year may also form a duality with TSMC, but it seems not easy at present." It could be a crisis," he said.
That is to say, the Dragon SoC, which everyone has complained about for a long time, may usher in a turnaround in the second half of this year, but the heat accumulation of chips using advanced processes is an inevitable problem, so don't have too high expectations. So for this matter, how do the small partners of the IT home view it?