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

CTOnews.com, November 9, according to DIGITIMES, the capacity utilization rate of TSMC's 7nm family has fallen below 50%, the decline intensified in the first quarter of 2023, and the expansion of Kaohsiung 7nm production has also been suspended. TSMC said it would not comment.

According to industry insiders, the 7nm capacity utilization rate of the Taichung Fab 15B plant is lower than expected, and the 2023Q1 decline is expected to worsen. The progress of the low-key bamboo Fab 12 (P8) plant is unknown, while the Kaohsiung Fab 22 plant 7nm plan will be shelved indefinitely, depending on the production capacity demand of each process and the construction of the new plant in the future.

It is said that at present, a series of adjustments, such as vigorously cutting orders and delaying shipments, have a greater impact. Although TSMC has a large number of 7nm customers, MediaTek, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, which transferred orders to 5/4nm, Intel, which is far less than expected, and limited Ziguang Zhanrui, bit mainland, and Alibaba, are the most influential.

Although it was full of confidence at last month's legal meeting, TSMC also expected for the first time that the capacity utilization of the 7/6nm process family will decline and will not return to previous levels until the first half of 2023, while TSMC will also adjust its plan to build a 7nm plant at the Fab 22 plant in Kaohsiung.

CTOnews.com learned that Qualcomm and MediaTek had previously warned of serious smartphone inventory. According to wafer industrialists, MediaTek is also one of the largest companies in this wave of big cuts.

Due to weak market conditions, Intel PC, servers and other products shipped less than expected, Intel also had to reduce TSMC orders, including Intel Arc A series GPU 6nm orders, as well as Xe-HPC architecture Ponte Vecchio 7nm orders.

In addition, shipments of new products are not as expected, and almost all of the top 10 customers have made adjustments, including NVIDIA's 7nm A100 chip and 4nm's H100 chip, as well as the largest number of RTX 40 series orders have also been fully revised or delayed, while Intel 4nm and the most important 3nm process orders have also been significantly adjusted.

However, TSMC orders below 5nm are still very hot. In addition to the new order using 5nm's AMD Zen 4 architecture Genoa and RDNA 3 architecture GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will also use the 4nm process.

It is worth mentioning that TSMC also has a large order for Apple's Mac series with annual shipments of nearly 20 million units from 2023, plus Apple normal orders such as iPhone and iPad. Semiconductor equipment industry said that the follow-up global IC design customers will expand TSMC orders after destocking, including Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek and other large companies.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.