Samsung has become a household name when it comes to electronic devices. From our smartphones to even washing machines, Samsung has indeed had a dominating effect. However, to catch up with the industry leader in producing cutting-edge semiconductors, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Samsung Electronics announced its road map to expand its chip manufacturing business on Wednesday.
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The South Korean technology corporation, best known for Samsung smartphones, has a sizable semiconductor sector that is its main source of profits. It manufactures memory chips for laptops and data centres. Apart from this, however, Samsung also has a chip manufacturing business known as Foundry. This business is responsible for producing semiconductors for other firms that are responsible for designing chips, like Qualcomm.
Samsung Foundry has asserted that its customers can take advantage of the business for competitive processes, design technologies, intellectual property, and high-volume manufacturing capacity. From the earliest design concept to high-volume manufacture with transparent and faultless execution, Samsung Foundry claims to be highly satisfied to have worked closely with every customer. As stated on Foundry’s website, the full suite of advanced process technologies includes 28FD-SOI, 14/10/8/5/4nm FinFet, and 3nm GAA with EUV technology from 5nm.
Samsung announced earlier this year that it would start producing chips using a 2-nanometer (nm) process in 2025. A more thorough road map has now been provided by the company, which states that it will start mass producing 2-nm chips in 2025 for mobile applications. After this, the company plans on expanding this to high-performance computing in 2026, followed by the automotive industry in 2027.
The size of each transistor on a chip is indicated by the nanometer value. More transistors can be crammed onto a single semiconductor as its size decreases. Usually, a reduction in nanoscale size results in devices that are more potent and effective. As a point of comparison, Apple’s most recent iPhone processor was created using a 5-nm process. Samsung is getting ready for 2025 because it expects smartphones to need more sophisticated semiconductors in the future.
High-performance computing involves chips that are used in data centres. This is needed to train and deploy artificial intelligence applications. Samsung is attempting to profit from the development of the technology, which has partly experienced growth with the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The production of Nvidia’s semiconductors, a market leader in AI chips, is dependent on foundries like TSMC.
The largest contract manufacturer in the world, TSMC of Taiwan, is far ahead of Samsung’s foundry. According to Counterpoint Research, TSMC accounted for 59% of worldwide semiconductor foundry revenue in the first quarter of the year, compared to Samsung’s 13%. By increasing its capacity and sketching out a roadmap for the chip market’s high-growth sectors, Samsung is currently trying to catch up.
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The company reaffirmed that the 1.4-nm process will launch as scheduled in 2027. In addition, Samsung stated that it is continuing to increase its capacity for producing chips by adding new production lines in Taylor, Texas, and Pyeongtaek, South Korea, both of which the company has previously disclosed.
