Samsung and TSMC competing to dominate 2nd-gen 3nm at global foundry industry

TSMC and Samsung Electronics, which are ranked as the world's top two semiconductor foundries, are competing against each other to attract customers for their second-generation Gate-All-Around (GAA) process, which is of 3-nanometer (nm) size. The companies are aiming to meet the demand from major customers such as Nvidia, Qualcomm, and AMD while ensuring that they achieve high yields early on to gain an edge over their competitors.

www.msn.com, Aug. 29, 2024 – 

Industry sources report that Samsung Electronics has begun producing prototypes using the 3-nanometer second-generation process. The company is currently testing the performance and reliability of the chip. Samsung's management has set an internal goal to increase the yield of the 3-nanometer second-generation process to over 60 percent within the next six months.

The first chip to use Samsung's 3-nanometer second-generation process is expected to be an Application Processor (AP) for wearables, such as the Galaxy Watch 7, which will be released this year. Using this product as a test bed, the company aims to apply the 3-nanometer second-generation process to Samsung Electronics System LSI's Exynos 2500 for the Galaxy S25, which will be released next year.

If the 3-nanometer second-generation chips show stable yields and performance, it is expected to bring back customers that were lost to TSMC. In particular, it is aiming to win a contract from Qualcomm, one of the world's largest mobile chip companies. Qualcomm has entrusted TSMC with the production of its next-generation mobile AP, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which it unveiled last year.

So far, the odds are in TSMC's favor. Nvidia, the world's largest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) company, is also considering entrusting TSMC with many of the next-generation products it plans to launch this year, following its earlier order for some of Intel's new Central Processing Unit (CPU) Meteor Lake. According to major news outlets, GPU-based high-performance artificial intelligence semiconductors slated for release this year, including the NVIDIA H200, B100, and AMD MI300X, will utilize TSMC's 3-nanometer process.

According to market research firm TrendForce, TSMC held a 57.9 percent share of the global foundry market as of the third quarter of last year. Samsung Electronics is second, but with a share of 12.4 percent, the gap between the two companies is more than 40 percentage points (P).

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