Text/Di Lin Review/Zi Yang Proofreader/Zhi Qiu
Since 2020, in order to compete for dominance in the field of professional wafer foundry, Samsung Electronics and TSMC have launched a fierce long-distance competition.
After the efforts of Samsung Electronics, from the high-precision process mass production time node, the Korean giant seems to have caught up with TSMC.
However, from the perspective of process yield and process effect, there is actually still a big gap between Samsung Electronics and TSMC.
Samsung checked thoroughly overnight
IT Home reported on February 22 that Digitimes reported that Samsung Electronics has launched a very rare internal investigation into the yield of its own wafer foundry.
This is because Samsung's internal executives have revealed that the company's foundry business orders are quite a lot, but because the yield is too low, it cannot be delivered to customers.
Therefore, Samsung's senior management immediately launched an in-depth investigation into the unbelievable yield of its own wafer foundry.
According to industry sources, Samsung Electronics' self-inspection has two purposes, one is to investigate "where several large sums of money originally scheduled to improve yields are used", and the other is whether the output reports of its semiconductor factories are fabricated out of thin air.
According to the author's understanding, the yield problem is mainly concentrated on the three high-precision process nodes of 5nm, 4nm and 3nm. You know, these three nodes are the key nodes of Samsung Electronics overtaking TSMC, no wonder the company is so concerned about yield issues.
On the one hand, Samsung Electronics has high hopes for its plan to catch up with TSMC with high-precision processes; on the other hand, because in order to overtake TSMC, Samsung Electronics has indeed invested a lot of money in the research and development and mass production of the above three process nodes.
The money is smashed into it, but the effect is far lower than expected, and Samsung Electronics naturally has to rush to investigate thoroughly.
Is there a big opportunity to overtake TSMC?
So, Samsung Electronics, which has serious problems in the yield of high-precision process mass production, has a greater chance of overtaking TSMC?
In fact, from the beginning, the author was not optimistic that Samsung Electronics could really catch up with TSMC, after all, there was a clear gap between the two sides.
It is embodied in the advanced process mass production speed, mass production scale, order scale, process performance, EUV lithography machine ownership, EUV lithography machine application proficiency and other aspects.
Therefore, even if Samsung Electronics itself is full of confidence, the author still believes that TSMC cannot be pulled down by Samsung in a short period of time. Facts have also proved that Samsung Electronics wants to overtake TSMC and needs to pay more efforts.
In addition to adjusting the yield as soon as possible, the process performance of Samsung Electronics also has a lot of room for improvement.
Taking the 4nm process as an example, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen 1 processor based on the Samsung Electronics 4nm process has really performed well.
According to the revelations of all parties, qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen1Plus based on TSMC's 4nm process is far better than Snapdragon 8 Gen1 in terms of running score and power consumption, and perhaps Qualcomm has expected to deliver Plus's order to TSMC.
It is true that the Snapdragon 8 Gen1Plus has an up-frequency processing compared to the Snapdragon 8Gen 1, but the process performance can indeed determine the performance of the chip to a large extent, and it is closely related to the power consumption and heat generation of the chip.
Therefore, the author believes that even if Samsung Electronics catches up with TSMC in terms of high-precision process mass production time, there will not be too many orders.
Unless, Samsung Electronics makes concessions on the FOUNDRY price and grabs TSMC's orders with a cost-effective advantage, but this plan will most likely not be adopted by this arrogant South Korean giant.
Of course, difficult to overtake does not mean that it is completely impossible to overtake, and Samsung Electronics also has some chances of winning.
The company plans to adopt the new GAA technology at the 3nm process node, which is more aggressive than the traditional FinFET process adopted by TSMC on the 3nm process.
Write at the end
If Samsung Electronics can solve the problem of mass production yield of the 3nm process, can smoothly achieve capacity climbing, and control the cost, it may be possible to chase the platform backlash at the 3nm node.
It will be relatively easy to talk about catching up after the leveling, in your opinion, can Samsung Electronics achieve its own lofty goals?