Samsung has made significant strides in chip production in the last couple of years, though that hasn’t stopped some customers from bringing their designs to TSMC. For example, NVIDIA, which has used the Taiwanese company to produce the GPUs for the RTX 40 graphics cards. It is now about to put several chip designs into mass production using the third generation of its 4nm lithographic process.
This process would bring with it the necessary improvements in consumption, performance and area that it needed. You only have to look at the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, manufactured at 4 nm by Samsung, and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, manufactured at 4 nm by TSMC, to see the huge difference in consumption between both lithographic processes.
This news comes from a business report published by the company a few days ago. With the second generation of this 4nm process it achieved some improvements, although there were rumors that the productivity of the first generation was around 60%. Well below the 70-80% that the TSMC process would have. With these enhancements, Samsung is expanding the 4nm process to more production lines, including the new factory set to open in Arizona in 2024.
This third-generation 4nm process could be used in the manufacture of Google’s G3 processor that would arrive in the Pixel 8 and that would be announced in September or October. Despite lithographic process issues, 4nm and 5nm would account for around 22% of Samsung Foundry’s total chip output, while 6nm and 7nm would account for 16%. At the moment it is not very well known in what situation the company’s 3 nm node is.
Via:
TechPowerUp.
