In the entire field of semiconductor manufacturing, TSMC is a well-deserved leader, because of the absolute leading technology, so the market share has always been in the first place, has been Apple, AMD, MediaTek and many other large customers support.
As another company that masters foundry technology, Samsung cannot take more customer orders because of the existence of TSMC, which makes Samsung feel very dissatisfied, so as early as 2019, Samsung began to increase investment and strive to gain an advantage in the field of mobile chips.
It is reported that Samsung has prepared hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, and the large-scale investment has also allowed Samsung to successfully win the big customer of Qualcomm, starting from 2020, more and more Qualcomm chips will be handed over to Samsung OEM, so that Samsung's semiconductor manufacturing business will grow instantaneously.
Now the latest Snapdragon 8Gen1 is also oem by Samsung, using Samsung 4nm process technology, and Samsung also plans to preempt TSMC in 2022 to produce more advanced 3nm technology, but unfortunately, Samsung still played on this track.
According to the latest reports, Samsung's wafer foundry may have falsified its 5nm and 4nm process yield data, which shows that the yield rate of the Snapdragon 8Gen1 chipset is only 35%, which means that only 35 of the 100 chips of Samsung's 4nm foundry can be used.
Such a low yield rate will affect the number of finished chips delivered to a certain extent, so we will see that after the mobile phone manufacturers release models equipped with Snapdragon 8Gen1, there is a shortage of stock for a long time.
In order to reduce the risk caused by the yield rate, Qualcomm finally can't sit still, and now there is news that Qualcomm has decided not to hand over its next-generation chip to Samsung OEM, but to re-choose TSMC.
This news is undoubtedly a big blow for Samsung, which has been trying to break the market position of TSMC, if it loses Qualcomm's super big customer, then Samsung's wafer foundry business can only rely on its own Exynos chip to digest.
In fact, Qualcomm gave up Samsung and chose TSMC again, not only because Samsung's yield rate is too low, but also because of other problems.
First of all, in terms of stability, the Snapdragon chip using the Samsung process, whether it is the Snapdragon 888 or the Snapdragon 8Gen1, its heating problem is much more serious than the chip that previously adopted the TSMC process, and it also poses a huge challenge to the heat dissipation design of mobile phone manufacturers.
Secondly, in terms of performance, take the Samsung 4nm process, the chip it produces, whether it is power consumption or transistor density, there is no significant improvement, compared with TSMC's 4nm process has a significant upgrade.
As the final version of the 5nm process, TSMC's 4nm process has improved performance by 11%, energy efficiency by 22%, and transistor density by 6%, and the chips produced have been significantly upgraded in both power consumption and performance.
It can be seen that TSMC is indeed much better than Samsung, in the past two years, Qualcomm chose Samsung technology, but also to a certain extent affected the reputation of Snapdragon chips, in order to restore the market reputation, Qualcomm had to give up Samsung and choose TSMC.
In this way, Qualcomm's next-generation chip to choose TSMC 3nm process is not surprising, perhaps with the help of TSMC, Qualcomm Snapdragon's reputation will be restored little by little, and TSMC will further consolidate its leading position in the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
So do you think Qualcomm will give up Samsung to choose TSMC again? Comment, like, share, and share your opinion.