The weak market of downstream consumer electronics continues to impact the upstream semiconductor industry, and wafer foundry is inevitably affected. At the same time, applications such as AI and HBM are booming, bringing new opportunities to the industry.

In this context, the importance of the advanced process of foundry foundry in the semiconductor field has become increasingly prominent, and the latest capacity planning and future advanced process planning of the two major foundry leaders of TSMC and Samsung have gradually become clear.

TSMC, Samsung two major foundry leaders latest production capacity planning, advanced process progress

TSMC semiconductor manufacturing process roadmap exposure, the future will be stable increase production capacity

Since the beginning of this year, TSMC has introduced its latest advanced semiconductor manufacturing process roadmap in Santa Clara, California, USA, and Taiwan, China, covering various processes for 3nm and 2nm process nodes.

The 3nm" family "currently planned by TSMC are N3, N3E, N3P, N3X, N3 AE, of which N3 is the basic version; N3E is an improved version, the cost is further optimized; N3P performance will be further improved, and production is planned for the second half of 2024; N3X focuses on high-performance computing equipment and plans to enter mass production in 2025. The N3 AE is designed specifically for the automotive sector with enhanced reliability, which will help customers reduce time to market by two to three years.

In terms of 2nm, TSMC expects the N2 process to enter mass production in 2025. According to TSMC, at the same power, N2 speed is 15% higher than N3E, or 30% lower power consumption, and the density is 1.15 times that of the original.

In terms of production capacity, TSMC revealed in May that in order to meet customer demand, TSMC has rapidly and steadily increased the production capacity of 7nm, 5nm and 3nm advanced processes, with an estimated compound growth rate of 40% from 2019 to 2023. Among them, TSMC will build an average of 2 new plants per year from 2017 to 2019, build 6 new plants in 2020, build 7 in 2021, build 3 in 2022, and build 2 new plants in 2023.

Samsung announced the AI era of wafer foundry development vision, 2025 mass production of 2nm

Samsung Electronics announced its latest Foundry technology innovation and business strategy at the 7th Samsung Foundry Forum (SFF) in 2023.

In the era of artificial intelligence, Samsung's wafer foundry program is based on GAA's advanced process technology to provide strong support for customers' needs in artificial intelligence applications. To this end, Samsung announced a detailed plan for the mass production of 2nm process and performance levels, and plans to achieve the mass production of 2nm process in the mobile field in 2025, and expand to HPC and automotive electronics in 2026 and 2027, respectively.

According to Samsung, the 2nm process (SF2) offers 12% higher performance, 25% higher efficiency and 5% less area than the 3nm process (SF3).

Samsung will also expand global foundry capacity, which the company plans to expand by 7.3 times from 2021 by 2027.

In terms of global production capacity, Samsung plans to mass-produce foundry products for the mobile field in South Korea, and focus more on the Pyeongtaek P3 plant. The new fab in Taylor, USA, is also on track to be completed by the end of this year and start production in the second half of 2024. At the same time, Samsung plans to expand its South Korean production base to Yongin after 2030 to help Samsung's next-generation wafer foundry services.

In addition, Samsung also said that in response to the rapid growth of the small chip market for mobile and HPC applications, Samsung this month established the "MDI (Multi-Die Integration) Alliance" with its SAFETM partners and a number of storage, packaging substrate and test manufacturers. In the future, Samsung will continue to work with SAFETM partners to expand the wafer foundry ecosystem.