In the past two years, , Samsung and TSMC, two foundries, have been competing with each other in terms of advanced manufacturing processes. They both want to be one step ahead of their opponents in mass-producing the most advanced manufacturing processes. At the financial report meeting in the first half of this year, TSMC announced that it would mass-produce the 3nm process in the second half of this year. Samsung, which was already lagging behind its opponents in 5nm, overtook TSMC in a corner this time.
Just today, Samsung Electronics officially announced that the company has begun mass production of 3-nanometer semiconductor chips at its Hwaseong factory in South Korea, making it the world's first company to mass-produce 3-nanometer chips.
According to Samsung’s official introduction, on the 3nm chip, it abandoned the previous FinFET architecture and adopted a new GAA transistor architecture, which greatly improved the power consumption performance of the chip.
Compared with 5nm, the newly developed 3nm process can reduce power consumption by 45%, reduce area by 16%, and improve performance by 23%.
At the same time, Samsung's second-generation 3-nanometer GAA manufacturing process is also under development. This second-generation process will reduce chip power consumption by up to 50%, improve performance by 30%, and reduce area by 35%.
also broke the news that Samsung’s 3nm process has also welcomed its first customers. The news speculated that Samsung itself and Shanghai Pan Silicon Semiconductor, a virtual currency mining machine chip design company, will become one of the initial customers.
However, apart from these two, there is no news that other manufacturers want to use Samsung's 3nm. The outside world has also made speculations about this. First of all, it is certain that the production capacity will not be enough in the initial stage of mass production. Even if there are customers at this time, Yield is not necessarily guaranteed.
Secondly, Samsung’s previous technology performance was not very good. Former major customers and Qualcomm all switched to TSMC. According to the news, Samsung is only maintaining a wait-and-see attitude towards mass production of 3nm. Qualcomm is currently only using it as a Alternative.
Of course, whether Samsung’s 3nm will be a turnaround or whether its performance will still be poor remains to be tested by the actual products of more manufacturers in the future.
