Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com September 4 news, 3nm era, Samsung chose to surround the gate   (GAAFET)   transistor architecture to build 3nm chips, while TSMC continued the fin field effect transistor (FinFET) program, TSMC 3nm (N3) chips are expected to be put into production in the second half of this year.

Taiwan's Economic Daily said that although it is slightly conservative in the 3nm generation, in any case, the width of the fin (Fin) is already close to the actual limit, and if it goes down again, it will encounter a bottleneck, so the foreign legal person estimates that TSMC's advanced 2nm process will adopt the high-end architecture of the surround gate field effect transistor GAAFET to produce 2nm chips.

According to TSMC's website, TSMC will continue to form an electronic design automation alliance with 16 EDA manufacturers around the world, including the top five EDA manufacturers in the world.

American foreign legal person pointed out that TSMC has a very close relationship with US manufacturers in terms of EDA software tools for advanced processes, and most of its high-end equipment and IP are not only supplied by US manufacturers, but also Klei (KLA) process monitoring equipment and ASML's extreme ultraviolet EUV lithography machine, which are also difficult to be replaced by Japanese, European and even Chinese manufacturers.

Foreign legal persons say that in the next five to 10 years, the world's advanced wafer manufacturing process will still design or manufacture chips based on American EDA software (currently mainly Xinsi Technology, Yihua computer and Siemens) and Silicon Intelligence IP as the core.

Although EDA tools are highly concentrated in the names of American enterprises, other large companies have not been absent in EDA. For example, MediaTek cooperated with Taiwan University's School of Power and Capital and Zhida Technology in early May to apply AI artificial intelligence technology to IC design to promote the intelligent development of EDA.

Hon Hai is also actively laying out semiconductor chip design, and its industrial USI revealed in mid-July that it was laying out semiconductors to lock in advanced packaging, testing, equipment and materials, electronic design automation software, chip design and other areas.

The foreign legal person of the Asian department points out that the global EDA market is about 11.5 billion US dollars in 2020, and it is estimated to be close to 13.4 billion US dollars this year. Although the scale is small, it is directly related to the global semiconductor industry with a scale of more than 600 billion US dollars, as well as the development of the global digital economy on a scale of several trillion US dollars.

As for the prospect of chip demand, TSMC said that its growth in 2023 will be supported by advanced technology, and high-performance computing (HPC) will become the main engine of long-term growth. The company currently expects that capacity utilization will remain good in 2023.

In terms of the timing of the launch of the next-generation chip, TSMC stressed that the 3nm (N3) chip would be put into production in the second half of this year and contribute revenue in the first half of next year. CTOnews.com warned that there are many derivative versions of TSMC's 3nm process, including N3, N3P, N3S, N3X, and N3E, which will be mass produced in the next two or three years.

For the 2nm chip (N2), TSMC reiterated that it will achieve mass production in 2025. 2nm chip is an important node of TSMC, this process will use nano-wafer transistor (Nanosheet) to replace fin field effect transistor (FinFET), which means that TSMC process has officially entered the era of GAA transistor. Among them, the speed of 2nm chip is 1015% faster than that of 3nm chip at the same power consumption. At the same speed, the power consumption is reduced by 25030%.

According to the financial report, TSMC's 5nm process wafer shipments accounted for 21% of the company's revenue in the second quarter (20% in the previous quarter), while 7nm process wafer shipments accounted for 30% of the company's revenue (30% in the previous quarter). 5nm process process revenue continued to improve in the current quarter, but did not exceed the revenue generated by 7nm process. In addition, TSMC advanced processes (7nm and more) accounted for 51 per cent of total revenue, up from 50 per cent in the previous quarter.

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