TSMC, which was established in 1987, was developed in the tail of the first 25 years without surprise, until 2011, after winning apple orders for the first time with a new packaging technology InFO, under the pressure of the mobile phone giant, coupled with the favorable timing and location of industrial development, TSMC ushered in a decade of rapid development.
For Apple, thanks to the continuous development of TSMC in process and packaging technology, and the rapid pace, it has played a strong support for the rise of Apple's chip empire.
Although TSMC and Apple are independent, they restrict each other and enter the positive cycle of chip development.
Apple to TSMC
As TSMC's largest customer, Apple contributes more than 3 times more revenue than TSMC's second largest customer, so that Apple does not have to pay upfront for production capacity like other customers. TSMC's 2021 financial report shows that the first major customer (that is, Apple) contributed revenue to 405.402 billion yuan, an annual increase of 20%, accounting for 26% of the company's revenue.
And according to DigiTimes, TSMC is expected to harvest $17 billion in revenue from Apple in 2022, up from $13.8 billion in 2021. Mainly because in addition to mobile phone chips, Apple is expected to fully replace the Intel X86 platform with M series chips by the end of 2022, and the Mac series with an annual shipment scale of nearly 20 million units has also become one of the keys to TSMC's HPC revenue growth this year. For the foreseeable future, TSMC is expected to remain Apple's sole chip supplier, Samsung is having problems with advanced process yields, and Intel is unlikely to receive orders from Apple.
Apple's orders for TSMC are intuitive revenues, and another, more far-reaching impact is that with Apple's participation, TSMC has been able to create many new technologies, especially in advanced processes, and Apple's importance has become more and more prominent.
The first thing to start with is the Fan-Out Package, which in the mid-2000s introduced Freescale and Infineon, the industry's first fan-out package types, RCP and eWLB, respectively. In 2006, Freescale introduced a fan-out technology called Redistributive Chip Packaging (RCP), and in 2010, Freescale licensed RCP to Nepes, which built a 300mm production line in South Korea to produce RCP technology. In 2007, Infineon licensed eWLB technology to ASE, and later, Infineon licensed eWLB to Nano, which is now owned by Alkor. Since then, although it has undergone a series of developments, the fan-out package has been tepid.
History of Fan-out (Source: Yole)
Until 2016, under the cooperation of Apple and TSMC, the fan-out packaging technology that has been developed for many years ushered in an important turning point. In 2016, the A10 application processor of Apple's iPhone 7 series mobile phones began to use Fan-Out technology, which created a huge demand for Fan-out, coupled with TSMC's technological breakthrough, the number of I/Os that Fan-out can support has increased significantly. The combination of the two takes the fan-out package to new heights. Today, fan-out packaging technology has become ubiquitous and is now the ideal choice for heterogeneous integration challenges.
Another successful technology, UltraFusion, an advanced packaging technology used in the latest Apple computer processor M1 Ultra, is also the result of a collaboration between the two companies. At last month's International Symposium on 3D ICs and Heterogeneous Integration, A presentation from TSMC demonstrated that Apple is using its InFO_LI package method to build its M1 Ultra processor and enable its UltraFusion chip-to-chip interconnect. InFO_LI use local silicon interconnects under multiple dies instead of using large and expensive intermediary layers, a concept very similar to Intel's embedded die interconnect bridge (EMIB). Apple was also one of the first companies to use InFO_LI technology.
(Image source: TSMC/Tom Wassick/Twitter)
In addition, Apple is said to have ordered a 2nm chip, which will be completed by TSMC in 2025. And Apple and TSMC are jointly developing 1nm chips for augmented reality headsets and Apple's automotive projects. Regarding the 1nm technology, according to an article published by TSMC in Nature, TSMC engineers said that they found a material with extremely low resistance and high current strength that can be used as a contact electrode for transistors. It is a bismuth (Bi) semimetal that not only meets the requirements of 1 nanometer process technology, but is also suitable for mass production. TSMC currently uses tungsten interconnects, while Intel uses cobalt interconnects, both of which have their advantages and both require specific factory tools. While 1nm chips are unlikely to become a reality in the next few years, the choice of bismuth semimetals is far from a reality. However, TSMC has made it clear that they are actively working in this direction.
Therefore, on the whole, Apple, as a large customer of TSMC's new technology, not only brings a breakthrough in new technology to TSMC, but also helps TSMC to increase its production capacity based on new technologies, and further optimize the process, and finally provide services for other customers with these new processes.
Apple is inseparable from TSMC
Because of TSMC's foundry support, Apple's self-developed chips have been advancing all the way, and Apple has also gained more autonomy in the supply chain.
The first is the mobile phone chip, since 2010 Apple designed the first processor A4, when Apple's processor orders were still contracted by Samsung, but TSMC has long been secretly carrying out joint research and development and technical research with Apple, TSMC was the first to solve design problems for Apple A6 chips. By 2013, TSMC officially began to oem A8 processors for Apple, and the iPhone 6 equipped with A8 chips is also known as Apple's best-selling product, with about 250 million units shipped as of 2019. With the power consumption of the A9 chip of Samsung OEM not as low as that of TSMC, since then, every generation of A series chips after A9 has been exclusively oem by TSMC, and now Apple's A series chips have reached the A15 bionic chip.
Then there's Apple's now hugely successful M series of computer chips, which has freed it from control of Intel and allowed Apple to further differentiate itself from other companies in the PC industry. According to the source @ mobile phone chip master broke the news, TSMC has a team of 300 people, covering research and development, design, advanced technology and packaging, in deep cooperation with Apple to develop the next generation of CPUs for PCs, NB and other products.
Apple's latest computer Mac Studio's core processor chip M1 Ultra, is the two M1 Max chips spliced together, it is understood that its biggest technological progress lies in the chip splicing technology UltraFusion, analysts believe that this technology is very dependent on the underlying chip manufacturing process from TSMC. This team is undoubtedly one of the keys behind the success of Apple's M series chips.
Apple will also launch a second-generation M series of chips in 2022, using an upgraded 5nm process. Therefore, the performance and efficiency improvement will be relatively small compared to the M1 generation. It is worth noting that Apple expects to release a third-generation M series chip based on 3nm in 2023, codenamed 'Ibiza', 'Lobos' and 'Palma', the high-end version has up to 40 CPU cores, 3nm will become the main highlight of Apple's third-generation M series chips, it is reported that the biggest increase in 3nm comes from the logic gate density, which is expected to reach 1.7 times of the 5nm node, while the power consumption is also up to 30% better than 5nm. There is also a 10-15% increase in transistor speed.
Then there's the baseband chip, because starting in 2023, Apple will start using its own baseband chip. According to apple's agreement with Qualcomm, Apple promised to use the latter's Snapdragon X65 and X70 baseband chips from June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2024, so after the success of Apple's 5G baseband chip self-development, it is bound to gradually get rid of its dependence on Qualcomm. And supply chain news, TSMC with advanced process to eat Apple 5G RF chip orders, market analysts analysis, the relevant chips will be produced using TSMC 6 nanometer RF process, the annual demand is expected to exceed 150,000 pieces.
TSMC's 6nm process, which belongs to the 7nm family, was first published by TSMC in 2021, and is also a problem mainly used to support advanced RF technologies for 5G mobile phones and improve the chip size and power consumption of 5G mobile phones. According to TSMC, the 6nm RF process for 5G RF transceivers below 6GHz and millimeter wave bands can provide a significant reduction in power consumption and area, while taking into account the performance, functionality and battery life required by consumers, and will also enhance the performance and power efficiency of WiFi 6/6e support.
In addition, Apple also has the W series chips of Apple Watch, the H series chips of AirPods, the T series security chips on Macs, and the U1 ultra-wideband chip on iPhones. Most of these chips are produced by TSMC.
It is worth mentioning that the autonomous driving AI chip that Apple is developing has also cooperated with TSMC, and the Apple Car has been described as Apple's "next star product". Apple is working with a South Korean outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) company to develop chip modules and packages for its Apple Car, according to TheElec, which notes that Apple is said to have adopted the same approach as the development of the M1 chip, where a single module is initially manufactured as a standalone chip for testing purposes before integrating the circuit into a single chip. Industry sources at DigiTimes said Apple was allegedly in talks with a South Korean substrate manufacturer to supply abfY-based flip chip ball grid array (FC-BGA) substrates specifically for Apple Car chips. This move will allow Apple to open up a new chip empire.
epilogue
The partnership between TSMC and Apple began a decade ago (in fact, earlier), and the two companies achieved each other, and ten years later, they have become the leaders of their respective tracks. Without the help of such a strong customer as Apple, TSMC is difficult to lead in the foundry industry. Today, whether it is Apple's A series, M series, or baseband chips, or even future automotive chips, it will be inseparable from TSMC's foundry support. The two companies are already inseparable, and in the future, the two will rely on each other to go further.
I hope that every foundry has an "Apple" on the road to development to make it a request, and every IC design company has a "TSMC" that has been providing continuous support for it.
Source: Content by Semiconductor Industry Watch (ID: icbank) original, author: Du Qin, thank you.