If there is anyone powerful enough to reverse the current crisis in semiconductors, it is TSMC. Unfortunately, the latest news does not call for hope or calm, because the company’s next manufacturing process is also causing problems.
The world’s leading semiconductor company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), is having difficulties with its next-generation 3-nanometer manufacturing process, despite assuring that everything was under control.
TSMC is the world’s largest contract chipmaker and It has some of the biggest technology companies in the world on its list of clients: Nvidia, AMD, Apple, Intel… And they are all waiting for their 3nm manufacturing process, which is scheduled to go into production in 2022.
However, a new report from the Taiwanese publication DigiTimes believes that TSMC faces performance issues with the 3nm processwhich may harm the expected production for the second half of 2022 (although this does not affect its profits).
In the semiconductor industry, the early stages of manufacturing involve a company producing large silicon wafers of limited quality to test production capacity. A wafer is made up of many individual chips, the final number of which depends on the size of the chips.
The yield of a chip manufacturing process refers to the number of chips on a wafer that pass the company’s final quality control tests.which consist of subjecting them to different voltages and charges that usually occur during operation.
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The media highlights that TSMC has developed different variants of the 3nm process to address this difficulty.but despite this, the volume of chips produced through the 3nm node could be insufficient for the production planned by the company during the second half of this year.
TSMC’s 3nm process uses the FinFET transistor architecture, which is the same used by earlier nodes such as the 5nm and 7nm processes. Instead, Samsung Foundry, its chipmaking rival, plans to use the GAAFET (Gate-All-Around) design for its 3nm process.
Samsung’s aggressive production schedule for the 3nm node has put it, along with TSMC, in a race to bring the advanced process to market first.
The Snapdragon 895 processor could use transistors from Samsung and not from TSMC, according to reliable sources
However, the Korean company is also facing difficulties with its technologies, such as lack of intellectual property, which is what provides a chipmaker with unique technologies that customers can use to differentiate their products in the marketplace.
In the midst of the semiconductor crisis we are experiencing, these problems do not pose anything good to a sector that is already saturated and that arrives late for all ordersI know they are done. It seems that 2022 will not be the year in which the stock crisis ends.