All along, the chips that use Samsung's advanced process foundry have been dissatisfied in all aspects, especially in terms of heat generation and power consumption. In particular, the disadvantage is more obvious compared with the opponent TSMC.
So why is this happening? Recently, DigiTimes released a large material, saying that Samsung is currently caught in a scandal, and some employees and former employees are suspected of forging and falsely reporting the yield rate of the 5nm, 4nm, and 3nm process.
At present, Samsung Electronics is planning to expand the investigation of the whereabouts of the large amount of funds spent to ensure production and yield, and suspects that there was "fraud" in the previous report on the output and yield of Samsung Semiconductor FOUNDRies.
It is reported that recently, Samsung Electronics' DS division (Samsung Electronics' semiconductor business and device solution division, to which Samsung's foundry business is affiliated) is under investigation by the management consulting department on the yield rate of Samsung's wafer foundry's 5nm process, followed by 4nm and 3nm.
An official familiar with the internal situation of Samsung Electronics said: "Due to the difficulty of meeting the recent foundry order volume due to the number of (foundry) deliveries, we are skeptical about the yield of the non-memory process, which is known to be possible to meet order deliveries based on this yield." ”
The official added: "The management consulting department investigated the claims of former and current DS executives about the output of a semiconductor foundry, and the consulting firm will determine whether these claims are true." ”
And it is precisely because of the crotch of Samsung's advanced process that it will lose chip orders from major customers Nvidia and Qualcomm.
According to TheElec, sources said that Qualcomm also handed over part of its foundry orders for its 4nm processor Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 to TSMC, while Qualcomm only handed over the foundry orders to Samsung Electronics.
Nvidia's 7nm order has been fought over by TSMC last year, and now if it completely loses Qualcomm's order, it must be a heavy blow for Samsung.
However, this can not be blamed on NVIDIA and Qualcomm, according to the revelations that Samsung's advanced technology nodes are facing production problems. Samsung Electronics' Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 yield is only about 35%, while its self-developed Exynos 2200 has a lower yield.