The world’s largest contract foundry is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). The firm manufactures chips for companies that design their own but don’t have the facilities to produce them. The equipment used to make chips is very complex and very expensive. For example, TSMC plans on spending $15 billion this year on capital expenditures. TSMC’s top customers include Apple, Qualcomm, and Huawei.
TSMC to begin risk-production of the 3nm process node next year
As a general rule, the more transistors inside a chip, the more powerful and energy-efficient it is. Approximately every other year, the transistor density nearly doubles allowing companies to design more powerful components. As an example, there will be 15 billion transistors inside the Apple A14 Bionic compared with the 8,5 billion packed inside the A13 Bionic and the 6.9 billion that was shoehorned into the A12 Bionic. If things go as planned, the Apple iPhone 12 series will be the first handsets to be powered by a 5nm chipset.
TSMC has said that it will build a factory in the U.S. that will start production in 2023. However, it will reportedly produce 5nm chips when it goes online which will be one generation behind the 3nm components that will be rolling off of TSMC’s assembly lines at its factories in Asia.
Originally TSMC was planning to make a shift from using FinFET transistors to GAA (gate-all-around) for the 3nm process node. But the foundry has decided to continue using FinFET to control the current running through transistors until it is ready to move along to the 2nm node.
