Recently, Samsung released a news that made the Korean chip industry rejoice: Samsung Electronics announced on its official website that the company's Hwaseong factory in South Korea has begun mass production of 3nm process semiconductor chips .
For a long time, Samsung and TSMC, two major chip manufacturers, have been competing with each other in the research and development of 3nm chip technology to see who can get the "first taste soup". With the mass production of Samsung's 3nm chips, the outcome seems to have been decided.
Samsung’s “Backstab”
According to media reports, in 2009, Samsung’s top business decision-making meeting secretly approved a plan - Kill Taiwan.
This plan reached the first step in 2022: Samsung successfully achieved mass production on 3nm chips, pulling TSMC from its chip leadership position and becoming the world's first manufacturer to mass-produce 3nm 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%. This is also the first time that a full GAA process has been used in chip manufacturing.
Behind Samsung's success, there is an unimaginable huge investment: the total investment in one factory in Samsung's Pyeongtaek Park alone exceeds 24 billion US dollars; Lee Jae-yong plans to invest 3550 million in the fields of chips, biotechnology and other fields in the next five years. billion US dollars, approximately 2.4 trillion yuan; Lee Jae-yong also visited three European countries non-stop, trying to buy more EUV (extreme ultraviolet light) lithography machines from the Netherlands ASML ...
Samsung's huge investment in chips has resulted in the first volume of 3nm chips Production success. So what changes will this 3nm mass production bring to the chip industry? Can Samsung completely defeat TSMC with the mass production of 3nm chips? Is there still a question mark over the quality of
?
Anyone familiar with the chip industry understands that in chip manufacturing, the smaller nm represents a more advanced manufacturing process. More advanced manufacturing processes can enable CPU and GPU to integrate more transistors inside, making the processor have more functions and higher performance. In other words, the advent of 3nm chips has brought the possibilities of electronic devices such as computers and mobile smart devices to a new level.
However, some industry insiders said that currently only Apple and Intel will clearly use 3nm. The products of these two companies have been designed based on TSMC's PDK for a long time, and they have paid in advance to cover TSMC's 3nm production line. It is now very unlikely that Apple and Intel will suddenly switch suppliers. As for Samsung's 3nm chips, it still needs to work hard to find buyers willing to buy them. According to HomeNet, Samsung has yet to receive 3nm orders.
Samsung is in such an embarrassing situation. The reason is the previous 5nm process yield problem of Samsung chip foundry. It turns out that Qualcomm uses the Snapdragon 888 manufactured by Samsung, and the power consumption is too high, and the power consumption problem is traced to the leakage of the transistor in the chip itself. This problem eventually led to the exposure of Samsung's poor chip foundry quality and the loss of many customers, including Qualcomm. It is reported that because the yield rate of Samsung's 4nm AP processor Snapdragon 8 Gen1 is about 35%, and the yield rate of Samsung's own 4nm Exynos2200 chip is even lower, Qualcomm has moved its 4nm AP processor Snapdragon 8 Gen1 Some of the OEM orders were given to TSMC, and this product was previously exclusively manufactured by Samsung Electronics.
Although Samsung is the first to mass-produce 3nm chips this time, many people in the industry are worried about the yield rate of its 3nm chips due to its poor reputation for chip quality.
TSMC is “eyeing”
Although Samsung has taken the lead in the 3nm process, this does not mean that Samsung will have smooth sailing in the chip foundry market.
On the one hand, due to the power consumption problem of 4nm process chips, important customers such as Qualcomm currently maintain a wait-and-see attitude towards Samsung's 3nm process and dare not try it at will. On the other hand, TSMC is planning to achieve mass production of 2nm chips in 2025, which means that Samsung needs to step up its research and development of new technologies to prevent it from being overtaken by TSMC in the next generation of new technologies.
It is worth mentioning that TSMC already has a 92% market share in advanced chip processes below 7nm, which ensures that Samsung is losing money on all product lines below 7nm. Starting from the US$10 billion ticket price of the 7nm process, each process continues to double and increase. The next generation of 2nm starts with a starting price of about US$40 billion for a factory. Whether Samsung will still have enough funds to carry out "Star Wars" with TSMC by then is also unknown.
In a recently released research report titled "Clash of Chips", the Morgan Stanley analysis team led by Shawn Kim pointed out that as the foundry competition landscape continues to evolve , the future chip battle will be mainly between TSMC, Samsung and Intel . Morgan Stanley pointed out in its report that currently, TSMC has gained more than 50% of the global foundry market share, and its operating profit margin has remained above 40% for a long time, which is only 15% higher than the average profit margin of its peers in the foundry industry. about 25 percentage points higher.
This has resulted in TSMC having a relatively large advantage in the competition with Samsung, as can be seen from the data. Between 2015 and 2020, TSMC's sales compound annual growth rate (CAGR) reached 10%, compared with 7% for its competitor Samsung. Morgan Stanley predicts that this trend is expected to continue until 2023, with TSMC's sales expected to grow at a compound growth rate of 22%, while Samsung's compound growth rate will be approximately 15%.
At the same time, facing the long-term pressure brought by TSMC, there are also many discordant voices within Samsung. A Samsung employee wrote a long statement, pointing out that Samsung is suffering from serious internal strife and even falsifying internal and external data. Faced with the chaotic situation, Samsung had to conduct a comprehensive audit of its foundry business in early 2022.
Industry insiders analyzed that this “chip war” between Samsung and TSMC is far from over. For the next 2nm chips, there will be new solutions to replace silicon chips in the future, and they will even face third-party camps composed of "backward" companies such as AMD, Apple, and NVIDIA. It is still unclear who will ultimately dominate the global chip market.
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