In the chip foundry market, Samsung and TSMC have a particularly obvious trend of catching up with each other. Every time one of them announces a breakthrough in advanced technology, the other will speed up. However, overall, TSMC’s layout is faster. For example, in the first half of this year, TSMC announced that it would mass-produce the 3nm process in the second half of this year.
For Samsung, which is still struggling with 5nm and the yield rate is still a "mystery", this news from TSMC has put a lot of pressure on Samsung. I originally thought that Samsung would always lag behind TSMC. But what we didn’t expect was that just recently, Samsung officially announced a piece of news. According to the news, Samsung announced that it has started mass production of 3nm chips, and this is the first company in the world to mass produce 3nm chips. After sees this news, we can think that Samsung has overtaken TSMC in the 3nm chip. However, this is just an appearance, because the actual chip has not been released, and we do not know whether Samsung's 3nm chip process meets the market's advanced process standards. If it is purely mass production, it cannot be defined as such. But despite this, Samsung's temporary overtaking in mass production has still put TSMC in a "swing". The editor of said this because of two points. First of all, we all know that in this chip foundry market, the trend is that whoever masters the chip process is more advanced, and the voice and market position will be more obvious. Although Samsung has only officially announced this news, it seems that it will not have much impact on TSMC. but it's not actually the case. We cannot ignore that there is a strong "backing" behind Samsung. On the one hand, South Korea’s attitude towards Samsung is obvious. Take some time ago, for example, South Korea planned to restart its nuclear power business to solve the power shortage. However, TSMC is still facing difficulties in this aspect. On the other hand, the United States is also very friendly towards Samsung. Before announcing the establishment of a technical alliance with South Korea, I interviewed Samsung's chip factory and praised Samsung vigorously. But there is a clear gap between TSMC and Samsung on this point, because TSMC is still required to share core chip technology with and Intel . So in this case, the world's first mass-produced 3nm chip company is dominated by Samsung. It is not difficult to imagine how much pressure is placed on TSMC. Secondly, before announcing mass production, Samsung also announced that ASML, a new generation of lithography machine , had also signed an agreement. But on this news, TSMC has not taken any further action yet. You know, ASML treated TSMC very favorably in the past, but now the situation has obviously changed. We do not rule out that ASML may not treat TSMC as favorably as before in the future. Once the acquisition of lithography machines is delayed compared to Samsung, then TSMC may not be able to catch up with Samsung's progress even if it mass-produces 3nm in the second half of the year. So I personally think that due to the pressure from Samsung’s backing and some changes in the situation regarding ASML’s acquisition of more advanced lithography machines, TSMC has obviously been “set aside”. After all, , according to normal progress, Samsung should not rush to announce the mass production of 3nm when the yield problem has not been solved. Then TSMC will be the leading one by then. Judging from the current situation of , it does not seem to be the situation that TSMC wants. What do you think of this matter? Welcome to leave comments, like and share!
