Samsung Foundry has been in the chip race with Taiwanese company TSMC for several years now. These two semiconductor giants almost always go head to head, periodically losing to each other in some moments. Samsung said last year that it would start making 3nm chips in mid-2022 and 5nm chips in 2025. In response, TSMC has released its production schedule for 3nm and 2nm chips.
The Taiwanese semiconductor giant said that mass production of the first N3 (3 nm) chips will start in the second half of 2022, they will enter the market in early 2023. Moreover, TSMC is already planning to start manufacturing 2nm (N2) chips in 2025, and they will use GAA FET (Gate All Around Field-Effect Transistors) ring gate technology. GAA FET is considered the next step in the evolution of the process technology compared to finFET. Such production is more expensive, so the largest players in this industry are in no hurry to switch to it, but are actively developing it.
TSMC is behind Samsung in GAA FET development. The South Korean company has already announced the introduction of new technology in 3-nm chips at the end of this year, which should significantly improve their energy efficiency. TSMC, in turn, is trying to make up for the gap with an aggressive strategy to release 3nm FinFET chips. The company intends to use a total of five 3nm process technologies: N3, N3E, N3P, N3S, and N3X. Each of them provides higher performance, transistor density and energy efficiency.
It’s also worth noting that TSMC has a secret FinFlex technology that helps chip designers precisely place their building blocks to optimize performance. How effective it is, only time will tell. In any case, many global brands using contract manufacturing (Apple, AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, MediaTek) will use advanced manufacturing processes from both TSMC and Samsung in the coming years.
Source: Trash Box
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