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After Samsung Electronics announced last year that it would invest $ 116 billion in its foundry business, a top Samsung executive recently revealed that 3nm chips are expected to be mass-produced in 2022, catching up with the leader in the TSMC (2330-TW) Progreso foundry, garnering top OEM orders for advanced manufacturing processes such as Apple and Super Micro.
A senior executive in Samsung’s foundry department said at an event last month that Samsung’s 3nm chip will be officially mass-produced in 2022. This news has not been mentioned before, which means that Samsung and TSMC will launch the same. year. 3 Nano chips, Samsung’s foundry design platform executive vice president of development, Park Jae-hong, told the event that Samsung has developed initial R&D tools with partners.
If Samsung can catch up with TSMC in the 3nm process, it will have a chance to become an alternative to Apple (AAPL-US) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD-US) in addition to TSMC. Park Jae-hong said that he is actively keeping up with the market. Samsung will continue to develop, innovate and strengthen Samsung’s foundry ecosystem through close cooperation with its partners, which also means that Samsung is accelerating its cooperation with TSMC. competition.
Unlike TSMC’s mature FinFET structure, Samsung’s 3nm process will adopt a new GAA (Surround Gate) architecture, allowing it to redesign and transform the core transistor of the chip, making the chip area smaller and the Processing speed. Faster and reduces energy consumption.
Samsung Securities analyst Kim Young-soo predicts that TSMC is expected to use the GAA architecture selected by Samsung in the development of the 2nm process in 2024. Technically speaking, Samsung is expected to overtake TSMC in 2023. Development will begin of the 2 nm process. It is expected that there will be a large number of state-of-the-art processors and computing chips on the market in the future. The key to expanding Samsung’s market is how many extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography process equipment you can buy.
However, Rino Choi, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Inha University in South Korea, said that while Samsung is expected to accelerate its overtaking of TSMC by adopting new technologies, if Samsung cannot rapidly increase production in the initial stage, you may suffer losses.
Market analysts are skeptical about whether Samsung can take over TSMC’s dominant position. TSMC spends around US $ 17 billion a year on research and development of advanced manufacturing processes. Although Samsung’s semiconductor division plans to spend US $ 26 billion on capital expenditures in 2020, it is still primarily focused on the memory business. investment.
Compared to memory, processor chip casting is more complicated, and foundries must always customize solutions for customers, increasing entry barriers to the foundry field. This barrier has also made Samsung more dependent on customers in the past. The chip design is OEM.
However, Samsung has recently beefed up its foundry solutions, which has also been well received by Nvidia. Samsung executives revealed to Bloomberg that the foundry business has increased 30% in customers last year, barring inquiries from Nvidia and IBM. Additionally, Qualcomm also signed a 1 trillion won contract for mobile phone processor chips with Samsung.
Samsung said it has competitive advantages in chip casting and related applications (such as Galaxy mobile phones), and the ace of 3D wafer packaging predicts that these advantages will be able to satisfy customers’ casting requirements. However, some companies can be cautious when outsourcing orders to competitors, and this is a big difference between TSMC and Samsung.
CLSA analyst Sanjeev Rana said that the competition between Samsung and TSMC is not only in the performance of the chip, but in the advanced process chip, which can maintain better power and efficiency. But establishing long-term relationships between TSMC and customers can provide better coordination of design, manufacture and production.
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