A few weeks ago, Samsung unveiled an aggressive plan of investing around $355 billion that could help it to gain the #1 spot, overthrowing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) as the world’s premier fabrication firm. In response, TSMC has announced an investment of around $120 billion to keep it ahead of the competition. Through this, the Taiwanese firm intends to build four new chip fabrication lines in Tainan, Taiwan worth $10 billion each. These factories shall manufacture lightning-fast 3nm chips, as per Nikkei Asia. Both manufacturers claim to make these chips available by the end of the year 2022.
In the not-so-distant past, the computing, mobile, and especially the automobile industry faced a dearth in the availability of semiconductors for their vehicles due to a fall in industrial outputs stemming from COVID-19 lockdowns. Even though their production schedules took a hit, Samsung and TSMC, the leading manufacturers, continued to develop faster chipsets for electronic devices in an ongoing bid to retain old customers as well as to attract new ones.
Having over 90% of advanced semiconductor device capacity, Taiwan remains the top chip producer. The rest is covered by South Korea as suggested by data from Semiconductor Industry Association.
Currently, both TSMC and Samsung Foundry are trying to attract industry leaders Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, MediaTek, etc. with their advanced nodes, upping the ante by employing Gate All Around (GAA) technology to offer 3nm chips, a notch faster than their already available 4nm chips.
Looking ahead, plans are underway by both competing firms to mass-produce 2nm chips intended to hit the market by 2025.
Source: Nikkei Asia via SamMobile