Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the world’s largest contract foundry. The company churns out chips designed by Apple, Huawei (until September 14th), Qualcomm, and others. Can you name the second-largest contract foundry worldwide? If you said Intel, you answered incorrectly; the company only produces chips for itself. Actually, the independent foundry looking up at TSMC is Samsung.
Samsung’s new fab will churn out 5nm chips late next year
Samsung says that the 5nm EUV chips from this plant will be used in 5G networks and high-performance computers by the second half of 2021. The fab will also be used to manufacture 3nm chips once the company moves on to mass production of the next lower process node. The transistor density of these chips will reach an amazing 300 million per square mm.
With the new facilities, Samsung will own seven foundry production lines in the U.S. and South Korea. TSMC announced late last week that it will build a $12 billion fab in the U.S. that won’t be running until 2023. The factory will produce 5nm chips at a time when the industry could be moving to 3nm. As a result, the announcement by TSMC really doesn’t change anything since the U.S. will still need to obtain 3nm chips overseas come 2023. Besides, the Arizona facility will produce only 20,000 wafers a month; that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 12 million wafers produced by TSMC in 2019. But unlike Samsung’s new factory in Seoul, TSMC’s plant in Arizona is really about creating jobs for Americans.
