At this 12 months’s TSMC Technology Symposium, the corporate took the chance to replace its clients and trade onlookers on the semiconductor producer’s newest developments with reference to its latest applied sciences and manufacturing roadmaps. As a part of an everyday presentation, the foundry up to date us on its standing on it’s present modern manufacturing applied sciences, the N7, N5 and their respective derivatives corresponding to N6 and N5.
TSMC segregates their modern manufacturing nodes into three product “families”: 7nm, 5nm and the upcoming 3nm manufacturing node. As many could have famous by a variety of merchandise during the last couple of years, TSMC’s 7nm node introduction and mass manufacturing beginning in 2018 was a real tour de pressure for the foundry, carving out a big management within the trade that the closest rivals have been struggling to maintain up with to at the present time.
To date, TSMC has shipped over 1 billion 7nm chips, and the 7nm household is thought to be being extraordinarily mature, with the foundry now specializing in ramping up 5nm merchandise and upcoming 3nm superior nodes.
In phrases of 7nm household capability, beginning in 2021 the yearly put in capability is actually beginning to decelerate considerably as many purchasers migrate over to the extra superior course of nodes.
Forecast capability projections for 2021 solely embrace a 14% improve in 7nm household capability – beginning a gradual tempo that’s prone to mimic the foundry’s capability development for the older 16nm course of household.
Although many purchasers are shifting in direction of 5nm and under, the 7nm household will stay very important for income, manufacturing capability, and buyer worth. The N6 node is an evolutionary design of the earlier N7 node variations and simplifies the manufacturing steps by introducing gentle utilization of EUV layers.
What’s been extraordinarily shocking to see is the speed of adoption of N6 and the way it’s changing N7 manufacturing quantity: In 4Q20 the N6 node solely accounted for 15% of the entire 7nm household manufacturing capability, whereas that is anticipated to succeed in 48-50% one 12 months later by 4Q21. This implies that as we’re talking, we’re seeing quite a lot of new ramps of brand-new high-volume N6 merchandise, which is sort of attention-grabbing. The traditional suspects can be distributors corresponding to MediaTek and their latest Dimensity SoCs, however we’ve additionally seen Qualcomm reveal 6nm mid-range SoC designs such because the Snapdragon 778G. We’ve but to listen to about N6 manufacturing from PC or HPC distributors, however given the big quantity ramp, one might very properly think about that there should be some new merchandise in these trade sectors as properly.
5nm Capacity to Quadruple by 2023 over 2020
TSMC’s 5nm course of node has been in mass manufacturing since 2020, and notably powers a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of latest SoCs powering Apple’s A14 chips within the iPhone 12 collection in addition to the brand new M1 Mac chip. Although HiSilicon was a lead buyer of TSMC at 5nm, TSMC had halted all manufacturing for the corporate final September because of commerce restrictions. TSMC in the present day updates that it has shipped 500ok N5 wafers, which might roughly characterize a couple of hundred million chips. While this result in Apple primarily having form of exclusivity for the N5 node in 2020, as extra corporations are beginning to ramp up their 5nm merchandise TSMC might want to ramp up much more manufacturing capability, which the corporate is closely investing in:
For the complete 12 months of 2021, TSMC expects to quickly double on their 2020 wafer capability, and additional rising that by 75% in 2022. By 2023 the corporate forecasts a quadrupling of the 2020 capability, and that might nonetheless be earlier than the corporate’s new 5nm Arizona manufacturing plant is scheduled to go surfing and add an extra 20ok wafers/month of capability.
TSMC’s N5 ramp goes…
