Emerging reports on American contracts with Taiwan’s TSMC semiconductor manufacturing company shed light on that regional manufacturer’s dominance in the industry, amid profound chip shortages in the global market. They also highlight some of the new terminology and advances in microprocessors themselves.
Steve Dent at Engadget reports TSMC will be able to offer 3-nanometer chip builds as early as next year for Apple and Intel.
Where TSMC already makes a significant portion of Apple chips, Dent indicates the volume will be higher for Intel, even though Intel is technically ‘subcontracting’ to TSMC, and has its own plans to boost semiconductor manufacturing operations internally.
In general, Dent reveals, companies are racing to new 3-nanometer design and promoting lower-nanometer numbers as a measure of vanguard technology.
“As it stands now, Intel has only just started rolling out its 10-nanometer chips (which are broadly equivalent to chips made with TSMC’s 7-nanometer process), and has delayed 7-nanometer production until 2023,” Dent writes. “If the rumors prove accurate, Intel could possibly beat AMD to 3-nanometer tech, as AMD plans to use 5-nanometer chips for its next-gen Zen 4 processors. AMD now relies on TSMC for its processor and GPU chips, as its previous supplier GlobalFoundries decided not to manufacture 7-nanometer or smaller chips back in 2018.”
So what is a 3-nanometer chip? Does it have a smaller footprint? Shorter gate distances?
“When a process is named something like ‘TSMC 5nm’, try not to think of that as actually saying something about nanometers and stuff – think of it as a trade mark, like ‘Coca Cola Zero’ and similar,” writes Vladislov Zorov at Quora. “It used to be that when they said this, it was actually about nanometers, but this was a long time ago, when chips were much simpler … Then they started making improvements that, even though stuff didn’t shrink, it changed in ways that increased efficiency as if it had shrunk, so they simply started using smaller and smaller numbers to denote these improvements; basically it means ‘this will behave roughly as a chip with 5nm gate length, if we had continued making chips in the old-school way’, but, in the end, it’s nothing more than a marketing name, and is unrelated to any measurable distance on the chip.”
As for TSMC’s dominance in the market, a piece at CNBC shows TSMC is responsible for the majority of all semiconductor manufacturing, towering over competitors, and that its revenue numbers are high above runner-ups like Samsung which has its own foundry operations.
“Taiwan’s outsized role in chipmaking has come under the spotlight as a global shortage of semiconductors forced several automakers to halt production,” writes Yen Nee Lee at CNBC. “Countries including the U.S. and Germany reached out to Taiwan to help alleviate bottlenecks in the production of chips. The shortage was a result of increased demand for electronics during the Covid-19 pandemic, and was exacerbated by former President Donald Trump’s trade war with China. Taiwan dominates the foundry market, or the outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing. Its contract manufacturers together accounted for more than 60% of total global foundry revenue last year…”
Look for big moves in semiconductor manufacturing to shake markets as the scarcity in chips continues.
